GMP found giving ‘slap on the wrist’ cautions for serious crimes

The Greater Manchester police are being criticised for handing out cautions for a series of serious crimes of the past five years.

This requires the offender to admit their crimes and provides an alternative to prosecution, however it has been found that they have been handed out for inappropriate offences including rape, child abduction and soliciting to commit murder.

Police and crime commissioner, Tony Lloyd, has said, “It is clearly unacceptable that cautions should be issued for serious crimes… Taking this approach without a clear, transparent and justifiable rationale risks endangering public confidence in the way in which the police deal with the most serious of offences.”

He is demanding answers from the GMP on how perpetrators of such serious crimes have ended up with a “slap on the wrist.”

It has been revealed that 14 cautions were given out to both men and boys for rape, including three offences against children, and a further 177 for other sex crimes. In 2015-16 three boys were cautioned for raping under-13s.

Half the rapists received a “conditional caution”, which could require them to complete a course addressing their behaviour or make amends to the victim. Official guidelines in UK courts on the other hand suggest a minimum of five years imprisonment for such a crime.

Other figures revealed include 86 cautions were handed out for robbery, 81 for gross bodily harm, 60 for racially or religiously aggravated assault, 18 for the possession of firearms and 18 for supplying class A drugs. Another was recorded for solicitation to commit murder.

Assistant chief constable of the GMP, Rob Potts, insisted that cautions were only given out for serious offences in exceptional circumstances and said, “Each offence is dealt with on an individual basis. Cautions are normally issued for more minor offences but no two cases are the same and all the circumstances are taken into account.”

However, in a city ranked amongst the worse in England for girls’ quality of life where sexual assaults amongst other attacks are reported so frequently, perhaps the police need to take a more serious approach in order to prevent them from happening.