Two Gloucestershire Police constables who subjected a mentally ill detainee to aggressive intimidation, gratuitous force, and degrading language at Gloucester Royal Hospital have been allowed to keep their jobs, despite a misconduct panel finding their actions amounted to gross misconduct.
PC 2869 Tyler Harris and PC 2991 Stuart Baker were tasked on 8th May 2024 with supervising ‘Person X’, who was in crisis and detained under section 136. She was handcuffed, in their care, and repeatedly asked to use the toilet. What followed was captured on CCTV and body-worn video and became the basis of a Regulation 43 hearing held between 8th and 11th December 2025 at Gloucestershire Police Headquarters. The panel was chaired by Assistant Chief Constable Arman Mathieson.
Although one of the drafted allegations about both officers ‘lacking tolerance’ was later withdrawn, the panel still made clear findings about the conduct that remained. The hearing concluded that Harris’s behaviour towards Person X was ‘threatening’, ‘overbearing’, and ‘offensive’, and that Baker’s use of force was ‘intentional’ and ‘aggressive’.
The panel accepted that Harris repeatedly used belittling and hostile language as Person X struggled, protested, and asked to use the toilet. He called her a ‘petulant little brat’, telling her to ‘sit down and shut up’, describing her as ‘boring’, and accusing her of being ‘selfish’. After she had been hurt, he was found to have dismissed her distress by telling her to stop ‘being so hysterical’. When refusing to take her to the toilet without her complying with his demands, he was found to have delivered what amounted to a taunting moral lecture: ‘sometimes you don’t get what you want in life’, followed by, ‘hopefully this experience will make you realise there are consequences to your actions’.
The most serious physical incident began when Person X attempted to get past PC Baker, who was blocking a door. The panel concluded Baker intentionally pushed her backwards with force, causing her to fall. Her head struck the arm of a chair. The report describes her as handcuffed to the rear at the time, and found that the push caused her significant distress and pain. The panel also found Baker showed no empathy for the injury and did not provide immediate attention to her welfare in the aftermath.
As Person X lay on the floor, the panel also considered Harris’s conduct around her head and face. The allegation was that he trapped her hair with his boot and then slipped his boot under her head so it made contact with her face. The panel did not accept the hair-trapping claim, and it did not find he placed his boot under her face ‘without justification’. Instead, it concluded Harris honestly believed he was temporarily cushioning her head by positioning his boot.
After additional officers entered the room to assist, Person X lashed out with her leg and kicked Harris with her bare feet. He immediately kicked her back with a booted foot, striking her shin and leaving a mark. The report notes an earlier factual error in the wording of the allegation about footwear, clarifying that Person X was wearing soft trainers. The panel concluded Harris’s kick was neither necessary, proportionate, nor reasonable, and that a colleague required Harris to leave the room afterwards.
Having found breaches of professional behaviour, the panel stated plainly that the conduct of both officers was serious enough to justify dismissal, and therefore amounted to gross misconduct. However, both officers were allowed to keep their jobs.
For Baker, the panel accepted that the push was deliberate and intentional, against a vulnerable person, but decided his ‘lack of empathy’ was not itself deliberate. It assessed his culpability as ‘medium’, and the harm as ‘medium’. Then, crucially, it reduced its overall seriousness assessment to ‘low’ after weighing mitigation: it characterised the proven conduct as a single brief episode within an ‘exceptionally prolonged and challenging incident’ lasting many hours, during which it said Baker’s conduct was otherwise professional; it cited possible provocation affecting judgement; it accepted he believed he was acting in good faith; it noted early admissions; and it credited him with remorse, insight, and an apology.
For Harris, the panel assessed the position differently. It found his conduct, particularly the kick, was ‘intentional, deliberate and targeted’, and it assessed both culpability and harm as ‘high’, with aggravating features including deliberate violence and ‘attempting to blame others’. Even so, it identified mitigation in similar terms – heat-of-the-moment provocation, a claimed belief in legitimate policing purpose, and early admissions – and, despite concluding his overall seriousness remained ‘high’, it still decided a final written warning was ‘adequate and proportionate’.
The end result was a final written warning of four years for Harris and two years for Baker, signed off by ACC Arman Mathieson on 19th December 2025.
OP-ED
Gloucestershire Police seem to have developed a pattern of allowing officers who comit violent assaults against detainess, to keep their jobs. In a recent case involving the same force, PS Thomas Coombs violently assaulted a detainee after they made ‘misogynistic remarks’. Despite the violence being clear, the outcome amounted to a final written warning, rather than a career-ending sanction. The panel excused the officers vile actions on the basis that he was ‘provoked’ and that he ‘lost control in difficult circumstances’.
A very different standard is adopted when it is police officers themselves who claim to be hurt, by nothing more than words. Such as when Gloucestershire Police officer PC Chase Frost was dismissed for offending two lesbian senior officers who are married to each other.
Reforms introduced in 2025 were meant to tighten the misconduct process precisely to stop this sort of abuse of process – where serious violence is proved, but culpability is quietly softened by Chief officers allowing dismissal to become ‘optional’. Now, dismissal is the rule rather than the expectation for gross misconduct. However, because this incident occurred in 2024, chief officers and panels are still, in practice, finding ways to keep officers in post for violent assaults as the 2025 rules do not apply.
Until all misconduct cases fall under the 2025 rules, chief constables and their assistants remain reluctant to sack officers for using inexcusable violence against members of the public, but will spare no officer who commits the cardinal sin of using hurtful words against fellow officers.
