A DETECTIVE who was instrumental in setting up a specialised unit which has brought hundreds of sex offenders to justice is set to retire this week.

Det Sgt Mark Whelan, who set up Lancashire Police’s Engage Team in 2006, said many of East Lancashire’s most vulnerable children and teenagers have been protected from exploitation in that time.

The 52-year-old, who joined the police in January 1995, believes it is the professionalism and dedication of the team’s officers, partners and staff that means it will continue to protect the most vulnerable in society long after he has retired.

The married father-of-two said: “I am sad to be leaving but extremely grateful I have had the opportunity in my career to have worked with many dedicated officers and staff who work tirelessly to secure the best outcomes for children. I am particularly proud of the work we did in discovering child sexual exploitation (CSE) and the building of the team to try and combat it."

Working all his career in the East of the county, predominantly in Blackburn, he started out in uniform dealing with emergency response work before moving into intelligence and covert policing, and was promoted in 2006 when he began working with missing children. It was that appointment that would ultimately lead to the creation of the engage team.

“That launched officially on March 11, 2008 but it had been operational for 18 months to two years before that.”

In 2006, DS Whelan and the engage team worked with the Lancashire Telegraph to launch the Keep Them Safe Campaign to stop children being groomed for sex by highlighting the problem of grooming gangs. That led to the Home Office commissioning a country-wide inquiry into sexual grooming and abduction, which involved girls as young as 10 being targeted by groups of men, in December 2007.

The work of the team was also heralded, winning many awards, and being classed as exemplary by Ofsted in how to deal with CSE. The team was invited to speak at the European Parliament and DS Whelan was the guest speaker at the Herman Goldstein Award for Excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing in America.

The unit has grown from initially being two officers and a sergeant to a 35-strong team featuring eight police officers, one sergeant, one missing from home coordinator and admin support staff. The rest of the team, which works out of Greenbank Police Station, is made up of representatives from social services, the NHS and the charity Parents Against Child Exploitation.

DS Whelan said: “Working in the police has been brilliant and everything I could have hoped for in a career. Serving members of the public, working to keep them safe particularly the vulnerable children has been extremely rewarding and is something I will look back on with pride and a sense of achievement.”

DS Whelan said he hopes to continue working in the field of CSE in the future after spending some time with his family.

He thanked the engage team for their support for more than a decade, giving special mention to Det Cons David Dutton, Det Cons Sal Yusuf and missing from home coordinator Anne Mazzolai.