It has been announced that ‘Opertion Soteria’ is to be extended from five pilot areas to every police force in the country. Operation Soteria is the name given to a supposedly new method of investigating rape and other serious sexual allegations.
A report into the results of the Soteria pilots, written by the academics who were largely responsible for devising Operation Soteria in the first place, concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they had been a great success.
The Soteria approach may indeed increase the rape conviction rate, but it will do so by convicting more innocent people
In Hellenistic religions, a soteria was a ‘sacrifice or series of sacrifices performed in expectation of… deliverance from a crisis.’ The crisis from which Operation Soteria is supposed to deliver us is an epidemic of rape.
Whether there is, in fact, a particular epidemic of rape, as opposed to changes in police recording criteria and greater willingness to report it is very hard to say, but few will disagree with the overall objective of trying to convict more rapists.
The Soteria approach is based upon six principles, or as it calls them, ‘pillars’. Some of these seem on their face very sensible such as ‘identifying repeat suspects’, or ‘improving the use of digital material’ in rape investigations. Another is entitled ‘embedding procedural justice and engaging victims,’ which seems to mean that the police should treat complainants well. Apart from the implied assumption that all complainants are victims, nobody could disagree with that principle either.
However, the very first pillar of Soteria does give rise to serious concerns. Police forces will now be required to take a ‘suspect-oriented’ approach to investigations. The police, the report explains, should:
‘begin by examining the suspect’s offending behaviour early in the investigation, rather than focusing on the victim as the first and primary site of the investigation.’
The law presumes suspects innocent until their guilt is proven, but this is not the Soterian way. The suspect’s ‘offending behaviour’ is to be assumed and it must form the starting point of the police investigation.
According to Mrs Braverman, who has enthusiastically supported Soteria, this
‘… will help ensure investigations focus on the suspect, and never on seeking to undermine the account of the victim.’
Well, indeed it will, but the police should not be encouraged to begin by skewing their investigations in favour of a potential prosecution. Nor should they be deterred from looking for evidence which undermines an accusation.
Investigators should be neutral, or if that is unattainable they should at least start from a position of neutrality. The police have huge investigative powers, while suspects cannot possibly conduct the sort of investigations that might be needed to demonstrate that a complainant’s account is unreliable or dishonest. If the police are deterred from uncovering evidence of falsity, the chances are high that no one else will be able to do so.
The Soteria approach may indeed increase the conviction rate, but it will do so by sacrificing justice or, less abstractly, by convicting more innocent people.
And quite apart from this – one would have thought obvious – point of principle, the police have a duty, based on statute:
‘to investigate all reasonable lines of inquiry, whether whether these point towards or away from a suspect.’
It is difficult to see how they are supposed to reconcile that duty with the Soteria and Suella Braverman approach.
Whenever a scandal in some public institution has been uncovered, the body responsible always insists that ‘lessons have been learnt.’ Generally this is quite untrue. This ‘suspect-centric’ approach to rape investigations is uncomfortably similar to that which led the Metropolitan police to ‘believe the victim’ in its investigation of Carl Beech. Instead of investigating Mr Beech’s credibility which, eventually, revealed that he was both a fraudster and a sex-offender, they adopted the ‘suspect-centric’ approach of raiding the houses of those who turned out to be his elderly victims. It is concerning that this fundamentally flawed approach to policing, albeit dressed up in new clothing, is now to be imposed on police forces across the country.
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