Murderer And Serial Sex Offender Simon Levy Given Whole Life Jail Sentence

0:00Shop vans and Albertsons for fresh savings every time you shop! This week at vans and Albertsons, get fresh, boneless, skinless chicken breasts for 1.99 per pound limit 10 pounds, and locally grown grape-ary cotton candy grapes are 2.99 per pound with digital coupon. Plus, 24 packs of Canada Dry or 7-up 12-ounce cans are 4.99 limit 1 with digital coupon. Enjoy fresh and delicious savings for every meal! Hurry in! These deals won't last! Visit vans or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save! Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes doctor prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses. So if you wake up sick, at home or on the road, you already have what you need. It's like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Say $45 with cold blue at urgentcarekit.com. Slash blue. Urgentcarekit.com. Slash blue.

1:02Shop vans and Albertsons for fresh savings every time you shop! This week at vans and Albertsons, get fresh, boneless, skinless chicken breasts for 1.99 per pound limit 10 pounds, and locally grown grape-ary cotton candy grapes are 2.99 per pound with digital coupon. Plus, 24 packs of Canada Dry or 7-up 12-ounce cans are 4.99 limit 1 with digital coupon. Enjoy fresh and delicious savings for every meal! Hurry in! These deals won't last! Visit vans or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save! Okay, let's unpack this. I want you to imagine, just for a second, that you are a detective. Okay, I'm picturing it. You have just arrested a completely ruthless serial killer. I mean, a man who has meticulously tracked, assaulted, and murdered multiple women across London. Right, so you're expecting a real monster. Exactly. You walk into this interrogation room, expecting to face, you know, this calculating cold mastermind. But the person sitting across from you is a 40-year-old man, and he is wearing children's

2:03pajamas. Wow, that is quite an image. Yeah, and it gets wilder. He has learning difficulties. He is literally asking for his mother, and by law, he actually requires an appropriate adult in the room just to understand the basic questions you're about to ask him. It is a profound contradiction, really. It is. And today, for you listening right now, we're doing a deep dive into how this exact paradox caused the UK justice system to suffer, well, one of its most catastrophic and fatal failures in modern history. Because that contradiction you just described, it basically created a diagnostic blind spot. A blind spot so massive that it allowed a known registered predator to just, you know, continue operating in plain sight. Right. And we're looking specifically at the case of Simon Livy. He is a double murderer and a serial rapist. And our source material today is a really comprehensive report from the Guardian. It essentially acts as an autopsy of exactly how the agency's design to stop him failed at, honestly, every conceivable level.

3:05So our mission today, you know, for the listener, isn't to just walk through another true crime timeline. No, not at all. We want to understand the invisible plumbing, so to speak, of the institutions that are supposed to protect the public. Because the police themselves have actually admitted on the record that Levie's second murder victim could likely have been saved, which is just devastating admission, right, saved if not for these staggering systemic errors. So to understand how that happened, we really need to start by looking at the final judgment because the judgment establishes the true severity of the threat that Levie actually posed to society. Exactly. So picture this, we're in the old Bailey, which is the central criminal court in London. Which Luke Kraft K.C. sentences Levie to a whole life tariff. Right. Mechanically speaking, what does that specific sentence actually mean in the context of the UK legal system? Well, to really understand the weight of a whole life tariff, you have to look at the overall architecture of UK sentencing, right?

4:06Okay, break that down for a minute. So under normal circumstances, when a UK judge hands down a life sentence, they aren't usually saying you will stay in prison until you die. They are actually setting a minimum term, like a pair. Exactly. Tariff say like 15 or 20 years. And once that minimum term expires, the offender isn't just automatically released. Right. They have to prove they are safe. Yeah. They become eligible to apply to the parole board and then the board assesses whether they are safe to be reintegrated into society. But a whole life order changes that entirely, right? It completely removes that mechanism. The whole life order, which is historically governed by schedule 21 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, means the parole board is never even in the equation. Wow. So they just never get a hearing? Never. The judge is essentially declaring that the crime is of such extreme gravity and the offender is so fundamentally beyond rehabilitation that the state's only recourse is permanent removal from society, meaning he will die in prison. He will die in prison, yeah.

5:06He will be borrowing some highly exceptional intervention by the home secretary, which is incredibly rare. To put this in perspective for you listening out of a UK prison population of roughly 87,000 people, levy joins a microscopic cohort. A very small group. Just 76 individuals are currently serving whole life orders. Yeah. It is reserved for the absolute apex of dangerous offenders. And the prosecutor in this case, Tom Little Casey, he argued for this ultimate penalty by stating that levy's sexual violence was inextricably interwoven with the killing. That is a very specific, very crucial legal phrase. I want to break down that phrasing because legally and psychologically, that distinction seems to be like the load bearing wall of the entire sentence. Oh, it absolutely is. When the prosecution says the sexual violence in the killing are inextricably interwoven, they are defining the offenders core psychological drive. How does that differ from a normal murder case if there is such a thing? Well, think about many homicides. Often a secondary crime might occur, right?

6:08Like a burglary goes wrong and a homeowner is killed to facilitate an escape. So the murder is just a means to an end? Right. The murder is instrumental. It serves a practical, albeit horrific purpose for the offender. But in levy's case, the murder wasn't a byproduct of another crime. It was the point. It exactly. The act of inflicting lethal violence and the act of sexual gratification were just completely fused together in his psychology. When the judge actually explicitly noted his morbid fascination with sex, rape and crime. Yeah. He ruthlessly exploited these women for his own pleasure. This signifies a level of predatory drive that just, well, it cannot be mitigated by standard correctional programs. Which brings us right back to that bizarre paradox we started with. Oh, the pajamas. Yes, the pajamas. We have a prosecutor and a judge confirming that levy operates at the highest echelon of psychopathy and predatory calculation right. Absolutely. Yet his physical presentation during his arrest for the first murder totally contradicts that.

7:08It's jarring. It's completely jarring. Yeah. You have a 40 year old man who is long term unemployed. He's living with his mother and his sister. He has dyslexia. He has autism and he has learning difficulties. And again, he's wearing children's pajamas and requires an appropriate adult to even be present during his police interviews. Just define that appropriate adult framework mechanically actually because it's super crucial here. Yeah. What exactly is the legal definition there? So under the police and criminal evidence act 1984, which is known as pace, if police suspect an interviewee is a juvenile or a vulnerable adult, they have to follow strict rules. Vulnerable meaning they might not understand their rights. Exactly. They might not fully comprehend the legal cautions or, you know, they might be highly susceptible to suggesting things that aren't true just because they are under pressure. So the police are legally required to have an appropriate adult present. Yes. And this person's job is not to offer a legal advice like a lawyer would right there

8:09in defense attorneys. No, their job is just to ensure the interview is conducted fairly and that the suspect actually understands what is happening in the room. Now you're probably listening to this thing. Well, that's just a standard legal safeguard. It really shouldn't change how it detectives the hard evidence of a murder. You would hope it wouldn't. But does the presence of an appropriate adult combined with, you know, the pajamas and the developmental difficulties? Does that actually change how detectives perceive the lethality of the suspect? It does. It creates massive cognitive dissonance for the investigators. How so? Because risk assessment fundamentally relies on heuristics. Yeah. You know, mental shortcuts. Investigators like all human beings operate with archetypes in their heads. Oh, I see. So when we conceptualize a highly organized serial killer, the archetype is often someone cunning, right? Someone cunning, socially adaptable and completely dominant. Ted Bundy is usually the classic example everyone goes to. Exactly. I'll be in an extreme one. But when detectives look at Levy, their heuristics just completely misfire.

9:13Because they just see dependency. Yes. They see a man who cannot navigate a basic conversation without a shaperone. And the danger here is that law enforcement might unconsciously equate social or developmental incompetence with operational incompetence. Oh, wow. So they basically assume if he can't even handle a standard police interview, how could he possibly orchestrate a series of complex evasive murders? Precisely. And it is a fatal underestimation. Because the reality is very different. The reality of psychological profiling is that predatory drive does not require high level social sophistication. That is terrifying. It really is. A predator can be entirely disorganized in their personal life, completely dependent on their family for basic needs, and still possess a lethal, hyperfocus capability when it comes to hunting vulnerable targets. So Levy's presentation basically acted as a sort of unintentional camouflage. Exactly. It short circuited the instincts of the very people who were specifically trained to identify

10:13him. You know, I think that's a pivotal insight for anyone trying to understand this case. The camouflage wasn't necessarily some masterclass in deception by an evil genius. No, it wasn't an act. It was just the reality of his daily life. But it functioned perfectly to completely blind the system. It really did. Shop vans and Albertsons for fresh savings every time you shop. This week at vans and Albertsons, get fresh, boneless, skinless chicken breasts for 199 per pound limit 10 pounds. And locally grown, grape-arie cotton candy grapes are 299 per pound with digital coupon. Plus 24 packs of Canada dry or 7-up 12 ounce cans are 499 limit one with digital coupon. Enjoy fresh and delicious savings for every meal. Hurry in, these deals won't last. Visit vans or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.

11:15Shop vans and Albertsons for fresh savings every time you shop. This week at vans and Albertsons, get fresh, boneless, skinless chicken breasts for 199 per pound limit 10 pounds. And locally grown, grape-arie cotton candy grapes are 299 per pound with digital coupon. Plus 24 packs of Canada dry or 7-up 12 ounce cans are 499 limit one with digital coupon. Enjoy fresh and delicious savings for every meal. Hurry in, these deals won't last. Visit vans or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save. However, to truly understand the mechanics of this institutional failure, I think we have to look away from Lady for a moment. We need to look at the people the system failed to protect. I agree. We absolutely have to send the victims here.

12:15Because the way the victims were treated provides, I think, the first clear window into how the bureaucracy operates when it encounters vulnerable populations. Yeah, because their demographics directly interact with how law enforcement protocols are applied. So the Guardian report details that Levy murdered two women and violently attacked a third. Right. Crements of Valencia Trujillo was 53 years old. She was murdered in Southeast London in March of 2025. And then just five months later, in August 2025, he murdered Cheryl Wilkins. She was in Tottenham, North London. And it was just one day before her 40th birthday. It's just devastating. And the physical evidence of that second murder is just, it's horrifying. The report notes Cheryl had 83 separate marks on her body. Yeah. That isn't just a killing. That is an unrestrained, completely frenzy to attack. It is an injury count of that magnitude indicates complete psychological disinhibition, meaning he wasn't holding back at all. Not at all. It shows an offender who is actively escalating, someone who has completely lost any fear

13:19of interruption or consequence. Now both Cremenza and Cheryl fit a very specific profile. The court heard they were vulnerable, they were assess workers, and they used drugs. Now you often hear that predators target these demographics because they are vulnerable. But mechanically speaking, what does that actually mean when it comes to the police response? Mechanically it's really about triage and societal blind spots. Okay, unpack that. Predators operate on a very grim calculus of risk versus reward. They target sex workers or individuals with substance dependencies because they bank on two specific things. Which are first isolation. These individuals often operate outside standard social safety nets. Right. And the second thing. Bank on is institutional friction, institutional fiction. What does that look like in practice? If a sex worker reports an assault, the predator assumes the police will view her primarily through the lens of her own illicit activities. So they see the prostitution of the drug possession first.

14:19Exactly. They see that rather than solely seeing her as a victim of a violent crime. So it's basically a triage failure. The system categorizes them as a nuisance or a vice issue rather than a high risk victim of violence. That's exactly it. But the impact statements from the families completely dismantled the predator's assumption that these women were isolated or unloved. Oh, those statements were incredibly powerful. Cheryl's mother, Mary, delivered a statement that is just incredibly difficult to hear. She actually referred to her daughter's death as a sacrifice to keep others safe. I remember reading that. It's heartbreaking. She told Levy. She lost her life to do this. But we truly believe Cheryl has saved countless women from being subjected to your disgusting and horrendous acts. Wow. And her sister spoke to, right? Yeah. Her sister, Lindsey Hicks, told him directly, you have destroyed our lives. I hope you rot in prison. I mean, to force a mother to find meaning in her daughter's brutal murder by calling it a sacrifice.

15:20Yeah, because the state failed to intervene. Exactly. It is a complete indictment of the entire system. And the only reason the system finally did intervene, the reason Levy got that whole life tear if at all comes down to the survival of a third woman. Yes, a woman identified in the report only as ED. ED's interaction with the system is sort of the Rosetta stone for understanding where the initial cracks formed, isn't it? It really is. In January of 2025, which keep in mind is before both of the murders, Levy attacked ED and Tottenham. He beat her. He raped her. He suffocated her. And he literally left her for dead. But she survived. She survived. She is a 35 year old mother. She's a classical pianist from Eastern Europe. And she had been trafficked into the UK. And she was using drugs. And when she testified, she showed just an unbelievable defiance. She really did. She said, let me try to steal her soul and dignity, but she vowed, I will play music again and smile. That's incredible. And both DCI Neil John and Judge Lucraft stated that without her bravery, securing that

16:23whole life tariff would have been virtually impossible. Her testimony was the absolute anchor of the prosecution's case. But we really need to look at what happened mechanically when she first tried to bring this case to the police. Right. Back in January 2025, right after the attack happened. Because she goes to the police, she reports this brutal, attempted murder and rape. And she stated on the record that the officers, quote, spoke to me like a child. Yeah, that phrase is very telling. Let's analyze that. Why does a police officer look at a 35 year old survivor of a brutal attack and speak to her like a child? This is where we see the mechanical breakdown of intersectionality in a policing context. Intersectionality. I can sound like an academic buzzword to some people. It can, but at a precinct desk, it dictates actual protocol. When a citizen walks into a police station, the intake officer is subconsciously and sometimes procedurally categorizing them. Right. ED is a mother and a pianist. But to the intake system, her file flags her as a traffic for a national, a sex worker,

17:27and a drug user. And the protocol just shifts based on those specific flags. It often does implicitly. Law enforcement systems are heavily bureaucratic. When dealing with individuals who have complex vulnerabilities, especially those involved in the illicit economy or who have language barriers, officers sometimes adopt a paternalistic tone or a dismissive one. Exactly. They might doubt the credibility of the narrative just because of the victim's drug use. So the mechanical result is that instead of triggering a rapid, high priority major crime investigation, the report is just met with skepticism. Skepticism and sluggish bureaucracy. By speaking to her like a child, the officers demonstrate they are viewing her as an unreliable dependent. Not as a crucial witness to an escalating serial predator. Right. You know, you're probably listening and thinking, if someone reports a rate and attempted murder, it shouldn't matter what their background is. The protocol should be completely identical. In a perfect world, yes. But you're saying the invisible plumbing of the precinct roads, her complaint differently,

18:30purely because of her demographics. Yes. The system basically requires victims to be ideal in order to receive optimal service. And ED was not an ideal victim on paper. No, she wasn't. So she had to navigate a second layer of institutional humiliation just to get the police to do their baseline job. And if she hadn't possessed such immense tenacity, it's highly probable her report would have just languished in some filing cabinet. Almost certainly. And the fact that ED's report was mismanaged in January 2025 is honestly just the tip of the iceberg here because much deeper to truly grasp the scale of the failure, we have to pull the timeline back even further because levy didn't just suddenly snap in 2025. No, he was entirely known to the authorities long before that. The report explicitly states he had a proven history of sexual offending dating all the way back to 2018. He was already on the sex offender register. The fact he'd been jailed in 2021 for two sexual assaults, which means his biometrics, his modus operandi and his psychological profile were already sitting in the police national

19:34computer, the PNC. He was a completely known entity. Exactly. So how does a known entity escalate like this? The guardian details that months before the first murder, levy carried out a campaign of assaults on London's public transit. Yeah, he committed ten separate sexual assaults on women on trains. The British Transport Police, the BTP, actually arrested him, but they made errors that delayed charging him, meaning he was released. Right. And while he was at on bail for the first set of attacks, he got right back on the trains and committed even more assaults. It's infuriating. Let's look at the mechanics of this transit issue. Why is the British Transport Police investigating this instead of the regular London police? And how does a delay in charging lead to him being back on the street? Okay, we have to look at jurisdictional boundaries here. The UK has territorial police forces like the Metropolitan Police in London who handle general law enforcement. But they also have special police forces. The British Transport Police is a specialized national force that strictly polices the railways

20:37and light rail systems. So when levy commits assaults on a train, the BTP automatically takes jurisdiction. Correct. But surely the BTP and the Met share the exact same databases, right? Well, they do both have access to the police national computer, which holds the overarching criminal records. However, local intelligence, ongoing investigations and specific risk assessments are very often kept on local force systems. Oh, I see. So there is an inherent systemic friction when two separate agencies are handling different aspects of an offender's behavior. So in this instance, the BTP arrested him. Right. But charging a suspect requires compiling a formal evidence file and presenting it to prosecutors and the BTP admitted to bureaucratic delays in assembling that specific file. And because of that delay, the clock just runs out on how long they can hold him without a charge so he gets bailed out. Exactly. Under UK law, the police have a strict pace clock. A pace clock. Yeah, it's a limit on how long they can detain someone in police custody before they must

21:39either charge them or release them either on bail or under investigation. So if the paperwork is delayed, the suspect just walks out the door. He walks right out. The mechanical failure here is that the BTP treated a serial sex offender who was actively escalating his attacks as a routine paperwork task. Not a critical public safety emergency that required an expedited file built. And what was the consequence for this massive fumble? Because this is wild. The Guardian note that the BTP moved one officer out of investigations that gave his supervisor a quote, verbal telling off. And they didn't even refer themselves to the independent police watchdog. The independent office for police conduct, the IOPC. Right. They exist precisely to investigate severe police failures that result in public harm. The fact that the BTP handled this internally with just a verbal warning shows a staggering lack of institutional self-awareness. They basically viewed it as an HR issue. Yeah, a misdeed line rather than a catastrophic failure of public protection.

22:40With the med police, the main force in London, they were about to make a decision that is arguably even worse. Oh, the risk assessment downgrade. Yes. In August of 2024, the med reviewed Levy's risk assessment. Now he was previously classified as a high risk, which is accurate, but they downgraded him to medium risk. And the reason they gave is just absolutely baffling. It really is. They downgraded his risk level because he was blind in one eye. We really need to unpack the mechanics of risk assessment software to understand how a decision like this even happens. Please do because it makes no sense. So police forces use standardized matrices, tools like the offender assessment system or OSCs, though the specific tool varies by agency and context. These algorithms calculate a score based on a bunch of variables, past convictions, substance abuse, housing stability, and physical health. Wait, hold on. So the detectives believed his blindness was a reprisal attack from a previous rape, right? Yes. That was their theory. After this physical injury made him less of a threat.

23:42I have to push back here. Go ahead. You're explaining how an algorithm works, but I really disagree that we can just blame the software here. It's a fair point. An algorithm doesn't read a file. A human detective does. If a human looks at a one eyed serial offender and says, well, his depth perception is off, so he's safe now, that's not a software glitch. No, it's not. That is human negligence. Getting a predator's risk because he lost an eye is like downgrading a hurricane's category because it changed direction. That is a really good analogy. The energy is still there. It's just going to hit somewhere else. That is an incredibly accurate structural analogy, and you are completely right to challenge the human element here. The algorithm might prompt the question, has the subjects suffered a debilitating physical injury? And if the officer checks, yes, the software might automatically subtract points from the overall danger score. But the officer doesn't have to agree with the final score, do they? Exactly. The software is intended to be a decision support tool, not a decision maker.

24:43It requires human oversight. And the detectives just fail to apply basic psychological logic. Completely. Predatory sexual violence is driven by a deep-seated need for control, power, and degradation. It is not cured by a physical impairment. If anything, wouldn't it make it worse? Absolutely. The injury was a reprisal for his offending. That injury could easily act as an accelerant. It could fuel his grievance, his anger, and his desire to reassert violent control. So by relying on a slod metric and failing to apply human intuition, the essentially just rubber stamped a predator as medium risk. They did. And that specific downgrade in August 2024 sets the stage for literally everything that follows. It does. And how this system handled him after he finally escalated to murder. The timeline accelerates really tragically here. January 2025, he attacks ED March 2025. He murders Carmenza Valencia Trujillo. And the police actually arrest him as a suspect for Carmenza's murder.

25:45But he doesn't stay in a cell. No, he is released on bail. The reason given is that they lack sufficient evidence to charge him. Let's explore the mechanics of this because to the average listener, this sounds totally insane. Oh no it does. This ex-offender recently reported for rape, now the primary suspect in a murder. How does he legally walk out the front door? We have to separate two distinct legal concepts here. The threshold for charging someone and the threshold for remanding them in custody. Okay, with the difference. In the UK, the police cannot simply charge a suspect with murder on their own authority. They must submit the case to the Crown Prosecution Service, the CPS. The CPS applies a strict two-stage test defined in the code for Crown prosecutors. First is the evidential stage. Is there a realistic prospect of conviction based on the admissible evidence? In second. Second is that the public interest stage. But the evidential stage is the hurdle here. So if the forensic results aren't back yet or the CCTV isn't fully processed, the CPS

26:45might say we don't have the evidential threshold met yet. Exactly. If the evidential threshold isn't met, the CPS literally cannot authorize a charge. And if he isn't charged. If he isn't charged, the police cannot hold him indefinitely. The bail act, 1976, dictates that a person has a presumptive right to bail unless there are substantial grounds to believe they will abscond, commit further offenses or interfere with witnesses. But surely, his history of escalating sexual violence provides substantial grounds to believe he will commit further offenses, right? It absolutely should. And this is where the system completely collapses. Because while he is out on bail, in August 2025, he murders Cheryl Wilkins. Yes. And following this, there are frantic efforts to get him remanded into custody. But the Guardian report details that at three separate court hearings, the CPS failed to provide key information to the judge showing the true extent of his danger. It's unbelievable. How does the CPS attend three distinct hearings for a known sex offender suspected of murder

27:46and failed to bring his complete file? It's a massive failure. Let's talk about the digital handover mechanics between the police and the prosecutors. Why didn't the CPS have the files? This is a textbook example of data silos and interoperability failures. Data silos. Yeah. The CPS was established in 1986 specifically to be independent of the police to ensure charging decisions were objective. Which makes sense in theory. Right. But that institutional separation creates a logistical chasm. The police use their own case management systems. The CPS uses a completely different digital platform. When the police want a remand suspect, they must compile a specific digital file, a remand application that summarizes the intelligence, the prior convictions, and the open investigations, like the BTP train attacks. So it's basically a relay race. Yes. But if a tire detective at the Met fails to, I know, manually attach the PDF of the BTP train attacks or fails to properly format the risk assessment, the CPS prosecute or standing in the courtroom literally cannot see it.

28:49Precisely. The prosecutor in the courtroom is operating entirely off the digital file provided to them, often finalized just hours before the hearing. Wow. If the Met police didn't include the intelligence about the train attacks or the attack on ED, the prosecutor cannot present it. Because they just don't know it exists. Exactly. Furthermore, the judge can only make a ruling based on the evidence formally presented in court. The prosecutor stands up and says, we request remand, but the defense argues, my client is only medium risk and has no recent convictions presented here. The judge is legally bound by the bail act to grant bail. You know, you're probably listening to this thinking, I would never let a guy with a rap sheet like that out on bail. Anyone would think that. But if you're the judge and the prosecutor legally isn't allowed to show you that rap sheet because of a missed digital handover, your hands are completely tied. It is the ultimate manifestation of systemic friction. It's terrifying. The terrifying reality is that the architecture of the justice system is fundamentally designed

29:50to prioritize the liberty of an uncharted suspect over the abstract concept of public safety. Unless an overwhelming burden of proof is meticulously documented and presented. Exactly. In this case, missing paperwork prioritized a predator's freedom at the direct expense of women's lives, which brings us to the inevitable aftermath. Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes doctor prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses. So if you wake up sick, at home or on the road, you already have what you need. It's like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Stay $45 with code blue at urgentcarekit.com. Slash blue. Urgentcarekit.com. Slash blue.

31:01Save online, install and add over 22,000 restaurants. And when it's time to redeem those rewards, get your money exactly how you want it. Choose PayPal, check, bill points, or cash out with gift cards. Eligible American Express Card members can choose to earn membership rewards points instead of cash back, terms and conditions supply. So go ahead, take a trip, fill a cart, order dessert. Pigeon is a world of rewards. Join today for free. Go to raciton.com or get the app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit? That's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes doctor prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses. So if you wake up sick, at home or on the road, you already have what you need. Just like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Say $45 with code blue at urgentcarekit.com slash blue.

32:05urgentcarekit.com slash blue. When the dust settles, when a man is given a whole life tariff and the public realizes that multiple women died because of paperwork delays and misjudged algorithms. The blame game begins. Oh, absolutely. And the post-mortem of this case is highly revealing of the current culture within UK law enforcement. Very revealing. Head of the Metropolitan Police, Commissioner Sir Mark Rally issued an apology. But he heavily shifted the blame onto the CPS and the courts. Commissioner Rally's statement was very specific, actually. What did he do? He stated he was repeatedly by the police put before the courts seeking remanding in custody. The police were saying this guy is too dangerous to be on the streets and between CPS and the courts, they kept bailing him. Okay. Let's look at Rally's argument objectively here. Is there merit to the claim that UK courts and the CPS have a systemic flaw here or is this just deflection? It's a mix of both. Because on one hand, yes, the CPS failed to present the files three times.

33:09That is a fact. There is certainly merit to the argument that the CPS is under resource and that the bail act sets a very high bar for remanding uncharged suspects. Right. However, Rally's defense is entirely incomplete. It omits the Met's own foundational failures. Well, it was Met officers who downgraded Levy's risk to medium. It was Met officers who spoke to ED like a child. Oh, right. The police provide the raw intelligence to the CPS. If the police's own assessment categorizes him as medium risk, it completely undermines their later arguments to the court that he is highly dangerous. And it's particularly striking because the Guardian article notes that Rally had previously made a major public pledge to take a quote, terrorism approach to male predatory violence. Yes, he did make that pledge. Mechanically, what does a terrorism approach actually mean in UK policing? A terrorism approach relies on proactive intelligence, gathering, relentless surveillance, and most importantly, interagency fusion.

34:10Meaning they actually talk to each other. Exactly. When investigating terrorism, the UK uses bodies like the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, where MI5, local police, and transport police all sit in the exact same room. During the same databases in real time. Real time. They do not drop the baton on paperwork. So if they applied a true terrorism approach to Simon Levy. The moment he escalated from train assaults to a brutal attack on ED, a multi-agency task force would have been triggered. His risk would have been escalated to critical. And the CPS would have been handed a titanium-clad dossier. The fact that he was treated with standard sluggish bureaucracy proves that the terrorism approach pledge was just rhetoric. There was an operational reality in this case. Not at all. And victim advocacy groups are calling this out. Harriet Wistrich from the Center for Women's Justice called the Failures Staggering. She was very vocal. She stated this is evidence the criminal justice system is in a state of collapse, and she concluded the met police are not fit for purpose. To remain impartial and understand why groups like the CWJ are using such forceful language,

35:15we have to look at the historical context provided in the report. Right, because they argue Levy is not an anomaly. No, the article links this to a pattern of institutional failures. They cite John Warboys, the black cab rapist who is left free to drug and assault women due to severe police errors. And they cite Wayne Cousins, right? Yes, a serving police officer who murdered Sarah Everard, whose prior incidents of indecent exposure were completely ignored. And David Carrick as well. The other met officer revealed as a serial rapist whose victims were ignored when they tried to complain. Because of this history, there is an official inquiry, the Angelini inquiry, that is actively considering a formal finding that the police are institutionally misogynist. That is a very heavy term. It is. Now, we need to be very precise here. We are analyzing the mechanics of institutions, not judging personal ethics. Mechanically, what does institutional misogyny actually mean? It's important to clarify. Because when people hear misogyny, they assume it means every individual officer holds prejudice

36:17views against women. That is a crucial distinction. The term traces its lineage back to the McPherson report in the 1990s, which defined institutional racism. Okay, how did they define it? When adapted to institutional misogyny, it does not mean individual malice. It means that the collective procedures, algorithms, resource allocations, and culture of the organization operate in a way that consistently fails to protect women. Or properly value their testimony. Beakly. So it's about how the plumbing is built, not necessarily who is turning the wrench. That's a great way to put it. If the risk assessment algorithm prioritizes a physical injury over a history of predatory control, that is an institutional flaw. If the intake protocol results in a trafficked woman being spoken to like a child, that is an institutional flaw. Or if a police force allocates massive resources to property theft, but leaves public transit sexual assaults to understaffed BTP units, basing paperwork delays. That is an institutional resource allocation choice that disproportionately harms women.

37:21That is what critics mean when they use the term institutional misogyny. It's a structural argument. Completely structural. So where does the accountability lie? Commissioner Rally points at the CPS. The CPS issues a vague statement saying people have and will continue to be disciplined, but refuses to provide details. Keeping it entirely internal. And the British Transport Police gives a supervisor a verbal warning. It is an endless loop of bureaucratic deflection. And this breeds a profound lack of public trust. I can imagine. The government has stated they have no plans for an independent inquiry specifically into the levy case. They are relying on the agencies to self correct. But as we've seen mechanically today, the agencies are heavily siloed and defensive. Exactly. Without transparent cross-agency structural reform, the friction points, the incompatible databases, the rigid algorithms, the triage protocols, they all remain exactly as they were. I want to take a moment and speak to why this matters to you, the listener. We spent this time dissecting the invisible plumbing of the justice system.

38:23The pace clocks, the digital handovers, the risk algorithms. There's a lot of technical stuff. It is. But the reason to care about this isn't just an academic interest in true crime. It's the realization that public safety doesn't rely on a single heroic detective. Right. It relies on a highly fragile, interconnected chain of agencies communicating perfectly. It relies on a desk sergeant typing the right cade, a software system sinking correctly across departments, and a prosecutor receiving a file before a 4.00pm deadline. And when those structural links break, the consequences aren't just mismetrics. They are fatal. The safety net is truly only as strong as its administrative integrity. In the case of Simon Livy, every single structural safeguard failed to bear the load. As we wrap up this analysis, I want to leave you with a final thought to mull over, building on everything we've discussed about algorithms and human intuition. It's an important tension to consider. We live in an era where massive, complex bureaucracies are increasingly relying on standardized

39:24matrices, algorithmic scores, and strict procedural checklists to manage overwhelming caseloads, which is inevitable given the volume. Right. We design the system to be more objective and data-driven. We have to ask, are we inadvertently designing out the fundamental human judgment required to look at a 40-year-old man and children's pajamas and recognize the lethal predator staring right back at us? It is the ultimate tension between bureaucratic standardization and human reality. Predators do not fit neatly into spreadsheets. They don't. And until the systems are built to recognize that, the blind spots will remain. Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into the mechanics of justice and failures. Stay curious, keep asking the hard questions about the systems that surround you, and we'll catch you next time. Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes Dr. prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses.

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