A former Surrey Police constable has been found to have committed gross misconduct after a panel concluded she smoked cannabis while off duty, then failed to disclose it when given a clear opportunity to do so during a ‘with cause’ drugs test.
In late May of 2024, PC Zara Ali was summoned to Surrey Police Headquarters to take a with cause drugs test. A drugs test that is conducted when the police have been given information that an officer is taking drugs, or where the officer’s on-duty behaviour is cause for concern.
The hearing was told that, after providing her sample, Ali became distressed and confided in her sergeant, Scott Legge. According to Legge’s account, Ali explained that she had been camping in the New Forest with her boyfriend and his friends, and that cannabis had been smoked. Ali described taking ‘one puff on a joint’, and expressed concern about what the result might show. Legge’s evidence was that he sought to calm her down, and that she understood the seriousness of the situation. Ali later disputed aspects of what she had said, but the panel accepted Legge’s version as reliable and contemporaneous.
Back at the station, Ali then spoke to a colleague, PC Annalise Ware, who also described her as emotional and anxious about whether the test might come back ‘positive or negative’. Ware told the panel that Ali was insistent that she did not take drugs. She said that Ali claimed she had been cycling with her boyfriend in the New Forest when she had suddenly experienced nicotine cravings. She stopped and approached a group of people unknown to her to ask for a cigarette. She said a male provided a hand-rolled cigarette, that she took a drag, and that it tasted or smelled ‘weird’, causing her to worry it might be ‘skunk’. She described discarding it. In a further variation recounted by PC Ware after Ali called her at home, Ali said the cigarette was pre-rolled and already lit, that she realised it was not a normal cigarette, and that she gave it back.
PC Ware claimed she was upset that Ali had put her in a difficult position by confiding in her, despite it being apparent that Ware had prompted Ali throughout. Ware even suggested that Ali could tell PSD that her ‘erratic behaviour’ – which may have been the reason for the test – was caused by ADHD. Ware then reported what she had been told to Sergeant Scott Legge. Legge concluded that, because Ware now also knew the story, he had no choice but to report the matter to a senior officer.
That decision triggered the formal misconduct process, with Ali issued with a regulation notice that relied upon her own admissions to Legge and Ware, rather than any disclosed laboratory outcome. The results of the drugs test were not disclosed in the report. Instead, the thrust of the case was not whether cannabis had been consumed, but what Ali had said when challenged, and how she sought to explain herself afterwards.
The panel concluded that Ali’s first account – in which she accepted she had taken a puff of cannabis while with her boyfriend and his friends – was the truthful one, and that the later ‘accidental puff’ story was an attempt to retreat from that admission once she realised the professional consequences. The determination recorded that her later versions were presented in a way that made her appear less culpable, and that this shift damaged her credibility.
Central to the panel’s findings was what happened at the point of testing. The panel found it proved that, before Ali provided her sample, the test administrator asked her – in Sergeant Legge’s presence – whether she had taken or used any drugs. The panel concluded she failed to disclose that she had smoked cannabis. That omission, it said, mattered because it was a clear opportunity to be candid, and the question was put explicitly. Ali knew she had smoked cannabis, and that her failure to declare it when asked was a ‘straightforward lie’ designed to avoid consequences and to gamble on the test outcome. It also found that her later shifting explanations were dishonest, advanced to minimise culpability once the seriousness of the situation became apparent.
The panel accepted that Ali’s initial disclosures to Legge and Ware were not, in themselves, discreditable – on the contrary, it treated those early admissions as truthful – but concluded that the later attempt to reframe events, coupled with the failure to disclose drug use when asked during the testing procedure, struck at the heart of what is expected of a constable.
Ali did not attend the hearing, having resigned before it took place and the panel proceeded in her absence. The formal outcome was a finding that she would have been dismissed had she remained in post. Her name will also be entered onto the barred list.
OP-ED
This is the first misconduct case where I actually got to speak to the officer involved before writing the story. Former PC Ali told me that the drugs test itself came back negative – something the report omits throughout. I have no reason to doubt her, given the fact that the misconduct panel concerned itself almost entirely with her admissions to various officers about smoking cannabis. Had the drug test been positive, her admissions would have been surplus to requirement, and entered as mitigation – not used as the thrust of the report or the grounds for dismissal.
This also draws parallels with a story I published in September, where an Essex Police constable took a ‘with cause’ drugs test, then admitted smoking cannabis, only to find out later that the result was negative. Had she kept quiet and waited, she would still be a police officer. In that story, however, it was clear the force delayed the test significantly until there was no trace of cannabis in her system. Zara Ali’s story is different inasmuch as the immediate test resulted in no findings of any drug in her system. Instead, she was sacked for admissions she made to two separate officers – irrespective of how improbable the story was that she allegedly gave.
The bottom line is this: if PC Zara Ali had not been foolish enough to confide in her fellow officers, she would still have a job. She learned a hard lesson – one that I repeatedly advise people, over and over again. Don’t talk to the police! Although, to be fair, I have never gone so far as to advise police officers themselves not to talk to the police. But unfortunately, this is what the service has become. Not a contained unit of comrades pulling together, but a disparate selection of individuals interested only in their own advancement. In other words, a microcosm of modern society.
Is this really the mantra of the police service these days: inform on your friends – turn in your colleagues? Even when you have given them an assurance that you won’t, as Sergeant Scott Legge had done in this situation. Although, in his defence, that promise was made prior to PC Annalise Ware coming to him with what she regarded as corroborating evidence she had extracted from Zara Ali. The same officer who reportedly insisted that Zara Ali should have dialled 999 the moment she was handed a roll-up that may have contained cannabis.
In short, what we have here are police officers willing to inform on their colleagues out of a misguided sense of paranoia that, if they don’t, they will be persecuted. By adopting this attitude, they endorse the public’s belief that the police service is becoming more like the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit by the day – more commonly known as the Stasi.
The public is already well versed in just how petty and over-zealous the police can be when it comes to pursuing trivial misdemeanours and casual utterances, so it should be no surprise that they will do it to their own kind. However, this kind of oppressive scrutiny must be fostering all kinds of paranoia and dissension within police ranks. What will happen to morale and staff numbers when individual officers finally realise that they must never let their guard down or confide in colleagues, remaining permanently vigilant and suspicious towards their own kind – colleagues who, in certain situations, they must entrust their lives to?
And by way of a postscript, if all this betrayal and back-stabbing isn’t bad enough, this misconduct report contained a major data protection breach that put the former officer at risk – one that I had to personally take steps to rectify. It’s a pending separate story, which will be published soon.
