The central purpose of our justice system is to protect the vulnerable and punish the wrongdoer.
But when civic authorities, including the police and courts, succumb to institutional cowardice, inertia, warped priorities and moral collapse in the face of brutish criminality, that noble ideal is lost.
Those failings were all too apparent in the notorious Rochdale grooming scandal, where predatory gangs of mainly Pakistani heritage abused and exploited local girls (many of them underage and most of them white) over many years.
This week we learned that the betrayal of those victims continues.
It has emerged that a key member of the Rochdale grooming gang, Abdul Rauf — a man who was convicted in 2012 of trafficking and sex with a 15-year-old — is still at large in the town.