I used to go out with a copper’s daughter. Her father was a lovely man who was a paragon of virtue although strict with it. When he drove in a 30mph zone he drove at exactly 28mph, he rarely drank and he also, when he was assigned to foot patrols in the then busy London docks area, didn’t tolerate illegal gambling on the street and made himself unpopular with dockworkers for breaking up their card games. He both enforced the law but also strictly abided by it himself. This is as it should be.
Fast forward to today and it seems that both the moral and ethical standard of Met Police recruits and the Met vetting procedures have failed dismally yet again. In this case the Met have failed to weed out those who grope random teenage girls in supermarkets. The vetting seems to have broken down so badly in this case that it will make people wonder whether those in charge of recruiting police officers are practising ‘diversity hiring’? It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that crap candidates are being recruited in order to tick an ethnicity or gender or religion box.
The London Standard said:
A Metropolitan Police special constable who groped a 14-year-old girl’s bottom in the queue at Tesco was caught thanks to the pineapple chunks he was buying at the time.
Hassnain Shahzad, 27, preyed on the schoolgirl while she was shopping with her mother at the Tesco Express in Bishopsgate in the City of London.
He put his hand on her bottom inside the store, in a moment the girl first thought might have been accidental, but to her "horror" she realised it was deliberate when Shahzad groped her a second time in the street outside.
The girl was hailed by a judge at Inner London crown court as "very bright and very brave" for coming forward to police and giving evidence in Shahzad’s trial.
She remembered her attacker had been holding a carton of chopped pineapple when the incident happened, helping City of London Police detectives to find him on CCTV and track him down.
Shahzad joined the Met as a special constable in June 2023, and he had just completed his training when the sexual assaults happened a few months later.
Londoners are very very lucky that this savage sex offender was caught. It was only because the victim noticed what the nonce officer was carrying that he was able to be found on CCTV.
The Standard continued:
On Thursday, Judge David Richards handed Shahzad a six-month prison term suspended for 18 months and ordered him to complete 25 rehabilitation days with the probation service as well as 120 hours of community service.
"This was not just a casual touching of someone’s upper leg or bottom, it was a violation of her rights over her own body", said the judge.
The Judge added as part of his sentencing remarks that Shahzad had ‘damaged the reputation’ of the Metropolitan Police. I had to laugh at that comment as it’s clear that the reputational ship of the Met has long since sailed and floundered on the rocks. Maybe the judge should have said that Shahzad had further damaged the reputation of the Met because it’s pretty low already?
Sadly I don’t think that Shazad is an outlier when it comes to criminal ethnic and religious minority police, there’s probably hundreds more like him in the Met Police alone. The abandonment of racial and religious neutrality in police hiring practises and the sidelining of character assessments and choosing competence over a candidate’s identity has probably ensured that there’s probably at least one ‘Shahzad’ in every London police station.