PSNI officer dismissed after investigation reveals ‘catalogue of corruption’
A former PSNI officer has been dismissed after a Police Ombudsman investigation uncovered what has been described as a “catalogue of corruption”, including the abuse of his position to begin a sexual relationship with a woman he met through his duties.
The officer was dismissed without notice after a PSNI misconduct panel unanimously found he had committed gross misconduct by breaching the force’s Code of Ethics.
The case had been referred to the Police Ombudsman by the Chief Constable after internal enquiries raised concerns that the officer may have abused his position for sexual purposes.
Police Ombudsman Jacqui Durkin said the officer’s behaviour had “the potential to do serious damage to public trust and confidence in policing”. The investigation stemmed from cross-allegations of assault between two women towards the end of 2018.
The officer, who had been asked to take a statement from one of the women, failed to disclose that he had previously been in a sexual relationship with the other woman and remained in social contact with her.
Within 24 hours of meeting the woman whose statement he had taken, he contacted her through Facebook and Snapchat and began a sexual relationship with her.
The pair subsequently lived together and had a child before their relationship ended in early 2020.
Ms Durkin said it was “appalling” that the officer had used his position to contact the woman. “The power imbalance between a police officer and a woman who is not only accused of a crime but has also alleged that she was a victim of a crime herself, could not be more stark,” she said.
The investigation also found that the officer later created a typed version of the woman’s statement, changed the date on which it had been taken and replaced his own name with that of another officer.
He then asked the other officer to sign the statement, but the colleague refused and reported the matter to his supervising sergeant.
The Ombudsman said the officer had also failed to disclose a further conflict of interest while investigating an assault allegation involving the woman’s former boyfriend.
Ms Durkin said he had three separate conflicts of interest in ongoing criminal investigations and had attempted to conceal one of them by falsifying an official record and trying to make a colleague complicit in his lie.
The investigation was later extended to a 2021 incident involving another former partner of the officer, who reported receiving an anonymous threatening letter containing an intimate photograph.
Police Ombudsman investigators found 51 images of the woman, including intimate photographs similar to that sent in the letter, on the officer’s phone.
A file was sent to the Public Prosecution Service, which directed that there should be no prosecution. A misconduct file was subsequently sent to the PSNI.
At a PSNI-chaired misconduct hearing in April this year, a three-person panel unanimously found that the officer had committed gross misconduct and dismissed him without notice.
Chief Superintendent Stephen Murray, head of the PSNI’s Professional Standards Department, said the behaviour identified in the case was “simply intolerable. Police officers are entrusted with significant powers and responsibilities. That trust must never be abused for personal or sexual gain,” he said.
The Police Ombudsman said abuse of position for sexual purposes accounted for 36% of the most serious cases currently under investigation by the organisation. Ms Durkin said: “This was not a series of mistakes. It was calculated behaviour from the moment this police officer chose not to declare his first conflict of interest until he was reported, arrested, suspended and dismissed. “This was a catalogue of corruption.”