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Police whistleblower on UK child grooming gangs: “They knew”

Former detective Maggie Oliver spent years trying to convince top police officials to protect vulnerable children from UK grooming gangs.

According to the former detective, dozens of young girls were subjected to years of sexual abuse and trafficking, only to be consistently let down by the very institution that was supposed to protect them. 

Oliver left her 16-year-career with the Greater Manchester Police to blow the whistle and now tells the story on the Crime Insiders podcast:

“They absolutely categorically knew what was going on,” Oliver told Crime Insiders.

When taskforce Augusta was formed, Oliver was tasked with speaking to social workers responsible for children targeted by grooming gangs. At first, there were about two dozen children social workers knew were being abused on a daily basis.

Oliver said at some point social workers had evidence files with the names of perpetrators, registration numbers, phone numbers and addresses.

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“The Police had done nothing. It had been going on for years,” she said.

“I look back now and they didn’t truly want to do anything. When I resigned, I started to talk publicly about what I’d seen. And the mayor of Manchester ordered an independent review”.

That review, published in 2020, found Augusta Operation was closed down because executives made the decision to not put resources into it.

“They buried that job as though it had never happened. They abandoned the job, children, they let a hundred pedophiles continue to walk the streets”.

Oliver says now investigators been forced to reopen the case, “and start all over again.”

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