EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

Sex crimes: The cost of failure

Delroy Grant, the so-called night stalker, was convicted yesterday of 29 offences, including a series of rapes of elderly women. The first was carried out in 1991. Eight years later, there was a chance to link him to what was already a pattern of burglary, violence and sex attacks. Ten years after that, in 2009, he was finally arrested. By then he had committed another 146 offences, including 23 further sexual assaults. The Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation into the case found that just three Metropolitanpolice officers should face misconduct charges.
This is the third such case in two years – and that is just in London. In March 2009, the taxi driver John Worboys was convicted of 19 charges of drugging and assaulting 12 women. Worboy's attacks spanned a five-year period and probably involved at least 19 other women. This time, the IPCC report led to the disciplining of five officers, and an overhaul of the way the Met investigates sex crimes. Weeks later, another serial sex attacker, a south London chef called Kirk Reid, was found guilty of raping and assaulting 71 women over seven years. Again, he might have been caught earlier. This time, the IPCC report led to five more officers facing disciplinary proceedings.

London might have the mournful title of UK rape capital, but the pattern is familiar across the country. Despite a concerted effort by the last government, the percentage of successful rape convictions as a proportion of complaints remains, campaigners say, in single figures. Progress like the network of sexual assault referral centres where police and medical staff are trained to help the vulnerable women who are most often (but by no means the only) victims have a proven record of success, and the number of cases pursued to prosecution – where the conviction figures are nearly 60% – are rising. Yet the Delroy Grant case is a tough reminder of how much is still to be done. The IPCC's light-touch approach to discipline is not helping.

Nor is the government. The home secretary should be cheered for taking up the recommendations of her predecessor's Stern report into rape complaints, but it seems reckless that, having been stung by the row over anonymity for those on rape charges, Theresa May then abandoned an inquiry into the bungled investigations. The police argue that better systems and smarter technology would prevent a repetition of the mistakes. They point to the rise in the reporting of sex offences. Yet they admit that there is one last victim of Delroy Grant's two decades of violence, and the errors that left him free to terrorise a community, and that is public confidence in their ability to hunt down such people in the future.

EU economy: Cuts, growth, debt and democracy

They thought it was all over. It isn't now. Europe's debt crisis remains toxic and unresolved, even as EU leaders meet in Brussels to back action that is supposed to restore the continent to good financial health. 

Yesterday Moody's, a credit ratings agency, exercised irresponsible omniscience to downgrade 30 Spanish banks and warn Britain that cuts in George Osborne's budget may not be severe enough to sustain Britain's AAA rating, while Ireland reported that last year its economy had shrunk for a third year in a row. Yields on Irish government 10-year bonds peaked at 10.21% – which is market code for the rising risk of a default. To put this in context, Ireland, an independent nation still with a big economy, is now trusted less by investors than John Lewis, the British retailer, whose bond offer, at a much lower rate, was oversubscribed this month.
On Wednesday the Portuguese government collapsed after the country's parliament refused to back a fourth austerity package. In Brussels earlier in the week the police fired water cannon at protesters who feel that austerity is being imposed, without any democratic backing at all, to please the markets. Never before has the EU's political elite been so far apart from its citizens, or so fragmented. The notion of a common European home with common interests is failing as some states, such as Germany and Sweden, return to pre-crash rates of growth while others, Greece, Portugal and Ireland among them, remain broke. Even before the summit began, a draft of its conclusions was leaked. It suggests eurozone leaders have not worked out how to fund the proposed European Stability Mechanism and its €700bn bailout fund, which is supposed to sort out the sovereign debt crisis once and for all.
None of this means the EU is about to fall apart or the euro collapse, but it does pile on the pressure, particularly for Germany where Angela Merkel wants to renegotiate the terms of Berlin's payments into the fund. In the short term even the Portuguese situation is manageable. The markets had already factored in the probability of an EU bailout, along the lines of Greece and Ireland. But without a secure government in Lisbon it will be hard to agree or enforce the terms. Even Ireland, which does have a new government elected on a platform of implementing an austerity budget, is trying to renegotiate the terms of its EU aid: instead a further bailout looks more likely. By taking what was private bank debt on its shoulders the Irish state has made the country's task harder, since any default would be a national not just a commercial one. In Portugal and Greece, it was always the state that was doing the spending.
There seem to be three possible outcomes. The most likely is that the eurozone will somehow muddle through, at the cost of more bailouts to indebted states, and somehow a mix of growth and austerity will ease the crisis, at huge social cost in places such as Greece. Or some states could demand and obtain easier repayment terms – perhaps defaulting altogether and hoping to rebuild as Iceland is managing to do. But if that happens, their ability to borrow from anyone other than the EU will be shot through. Finally, the euro could collapse, its rich members taking one course and leaving the rest to go to hell in handcart. But that would effectively wreck the EU.
Of these the first is the most palatable option and the one EU leaders are sticking to. Even Britain, excluded from the eurozone core meetings, sees the advantages, which is why Eurosceptical David Cameron is saying so little. But what if the debt terms and enforced austerity prove so onerous that more governments fall rather than implement them? Perhaps some economies will never prove strong enough to crawl out from the commitments imposed on them. Britain is not alone in facing a hard choice between cuts, growth, debt and democracy.

In praise of … amateur sleuths

Blay trawled chat logs to unearth the trail of a character who turned out to have morbid fascinations.

Whether it is shrewd spinsters (Miss Marple), curious clergy (Father Brown) or high-schoolers with hunches (Nancy Drew), the world of fiction has its fair share of amateur detectives, outwitting the local plod. In real life we rarely hear about crime-solvers in the community. But the conviction last week of William Melchert-Dinkel in a US court, for aiding the suicides of Mark Drybrough, from Coventry, and a Canadian student, Nadia Kajouji, highlighted dogged digging by a 64-year-old Wiltshire grandmother, Celia Blay. First alerted to Melchert-Dinkel's activities in 2002, after encountering a depressed teenager who had met a "female nurse" online who "advised" them to take pills, Blay trawled chat logs to unearth the trail of a character who turned out to have morbid fascinations. He would befriend vulnerable and often young victims, feign sympathy and then enter into one-sided suicide pacts. Despite rebuffs from both the FBI and British police, Blay persisted for eight years until the Minnesota police took up the case and arrested Melchert-Dinkel on her evidence. Blay's tenacity echoes that of housewife Susan Galbreath, who tracked the perpetrators of a heinous murder in her hometown of Mayfield, Kentucky to justice over seven years, long after official law enforcers had given up. One striking feature of both cases was the police's initial reluctance to grapple with evidence amassed by amateurs. Melchert-Dinkel's conviction proves beyond reasonable doubt that this needs to change.