A Greater Manchester Police officer has been found to have committed gross misconduct after bombarding a highly vulnerable woman with more than 239 text messages over a six week period. A course of conduct that the officer claims he could not remember due to an undiagnosed mental illness.
The officer, referred to only as ‘Officer A’, was the subject of an accelerated misconduct hearing chaired by Chief Constable Stephen Watson. Despite the seriousness of the findings, GMP have published only a heavily sanitised account of the case, omitting key factual detail. The force has failed to disclose how the officer first encountered the vulnerable woman, whether any of the messages were welcomed or reciprocated, or even the general nature of the communications themselves. No explanation has been given as to why anonymity was granted, notwithstanding Watson’s own observation that, were the full facts to be understood by the public, it would be ‘inevitable’ that the officer’s conduct would bring the profession into disrepute and damage public trust.
What is clear is that the woman was known to be highly vulnerable at the point of first contact, and that her vulnerability persisted throughout. The Chief Constable found that the officer knew, or ought to have known, this, yet continued to send an exceptional volume of messages using both police-issued and personal devices. The conduct was described as persistent, deliberate, and for a sexual motive.
The most striking feature of the hearing, however, was not the messaging itself, but the officer’s determined attempt to derail the proceedings altogether. In the hours immediately preceding the hearing, Officer A submitted a barrage of applications challenging what he described as the ‘fairness’ of the process. The misconduct decision devoted more space to cataloguing these procedural manoeuvres than to describing the underlying misconduct.
The applications included challenges relating to fitness to participate, alleged pre-knowledge of disability, a request for an adjournment pending the outcome of a grievance, an allegation of abuse of process, applications for directions on disclosure, an application for the exclusion of evidence, an application to dismiss or stay the proceedings entirely, and a late request for ‘reasonable adjustments’ to be made during the hearing itself. Watson described this barrage as both cynical and unreasonable, noting that the lateness of the submissions rendered any meaningful accommodation impractical.
When these efforts failed, the officer advanced what appeared to be a last ditch attempt to mitigate or excuse his conduct by blaming it on ‘undiagnosed’ mental health conditions. He claimed that these unspecified conditions had significantly impaired his decision-making to such an extent that he formed no malign or inappropriate intent and could not even remember the detail of the events in question.
This argument was rejected by the panel. While the officer was able to demonstrate that he is diagnosed with a range of conditions, Watson made clear that no medical evidence had been presented to establish any causal link between those conditions and the misconduct itself. The Chief Constable stated that he was not dismissive of mental health issues in general, but was ‘not persuaded that these issues came close to mitigating the evidenced misconduct found’.
Despite arguments advanced on the officer’s behalf that lesser sanctions could be considered, the Chief Constable concluded that dismissal was the only outcome capable of meeting the statutory purpose of misconduct proceedings. Public confidence, he said, lay at the heart of the process, and the seriousness of the case was ‘very high’.
