Police officer David Carrick, 48, retired from London’s Metropolitan Police, was sentenced to life in prison, this Tuesday (7), for 85 crimes committed against 12 women over 17 years.
He admitted guilt on all charges and will have to serve at least 32 years in prison, discounting the time he has been in custody since he was arrested in 2021, so that the progression of the sentence is not even considered.
“You behaved as if you were untouchable, and for almost two decades you proved yourself right,” Southwark High Court Judge Cheema-Grubb said at the sentencing.
According to the judge, the convict betrayed his oath to protect the population and used the “monstrous advantage” of his position as a police officer to exercise “exceptional powers of control and coercion”.
Among Carrick’s 85 crimes are rape, sexual assault, false imprisonment, and coercive and controlling behavior. All of them were practiced against 12 women between 2003 and 2020 while he was a police officer.
The man humiliated the women, calling them “slaves”, controlling their financial life and isolating them from close people. He would also lock them in a cupboard under the stairs of his house for hours without food.
“He enjoyed humiliating them and used his professional position to make it clear that it was pointless to seek help because no one would believe them,” said Police Chief Inspector Iain Moor.
Carrick met one of them in a bar in 2003, when he assured her she would be safe with him, before pulling a gun on her and repeatedly raping her, according to the victim.
Another woman, whom he met after chatting on a dating site, described the man as a “monster” who forced her to do housework naked.
A third reported that he beat her with a whip, whistled at her like a dog and treated her like an object that “belonged to him and should obey him”.
Carrick joined the institution in 2001, which covers the whole of Greater London (with the exception of the financial district), and in 2009 was selected to bear arms and provide security for diplomatic and Parliamentary sites.
Not every UK police officer is allowed to carry and use weapons while on duty. The proportion of those who had this right in March 2022, the last data available, was 4.3% of the body in the country (6,192 against 142,000 members), a stable fraction over the last ten years, according to a report by the British government.
“We should have identified the pattern of abusive behavior [de Carrick] and, because we didn’t, we lost the opportunity to remove him from the institution,” he said in a note to the Met, as the Metropolitan Police is known, acknowledging that, after the arrest and suspension of the officer, in 2021, a review of his identified the man’s involvement in a series of incidents, both before and after he joined the force, for which he had never been investigated and punished.
The corporation has been the target of public scrutiny and mistrust of the population in recent years due to sexual crimes committed by police officers.
A year ago, the head of Scotland Yard (headquarters of the Met), Cressida Dick, resigned amid a scandal involving misogynistic and discriminatory conduct by police officers and cases of sexual harassment, revealed by internal affairs at the corporation at the time.
In September 2021, police officer Wayne Couzens was also sentenced to life in prison for the kidnapping, rape and death of Sarah Everard’s executive. The case shocked the United Kingdom and sparked protests against gender violence in the country.
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