LONDON – The serial rapist and former London police officer David Carrick on Tuesday was sentenced to life in prison for carrying out an “unrestrained campaign of rape and abusing” 12 women over almost two decades.
Carrick pleaded guilty to 49 charges that included 71 instances of serious sexual offending. The 48-year-old most recently served in the elite force protecting Britain’s Houses of Parliament and foreign embassies.
“These convictions represent a spectacular downfall for a man charged with upholding the law,” Judge Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said in handing down the sentence. “You took monstrous advantage of women drawn into intimate relationships with you. You brazenly raped and sexually assaulted many women, some you barely knew.”
The conviction has plunged London’s Metropolitan Police Service into a fresh credibility crisis. The organisation has been beset by a string of damaging scandals that have shaken public trust in Britain’s biggest police force.
Touching on that issue, Judge Cheema-Grubb said the repeated reluctance of his victims to come forward illustrates “an astonishing degree of moral corruption” in the way victims of sexual crime are treated in society.
The Met’s previous chief quit following an investigation that revealed misogyny, racism and homophobia were rife among its officers.
In 2021, protests erupted around Britain after a serving police officer abducted and murdered Ms Sarah Everard.
Prosecutors on Monday gave details about the gruesome and abusive nature of his crimes against 12 women. The frequency and the level of humiliation he inflicted on the victims increased with time, prosecution lawyers told the court.
“You drilled into her that you’re the police, you’re the law and you owned her,” Judge Cheema-Grubb said, referring to accounts of one of the victims.
Carrick exploited his position as a police officer to commit the offences and silence victims, lawyers said. He committed many of the offences in three coercive relationships, where he kept the women under constant surveillance and controlled when they slept and what they ate.
“Mr. Carrick takes full responsibility for what he’s done,” his lawyer Alisdair Williamson said in court on Monday. “He cannot ask for mercy and does not.” BLOOMBERG
