Latest news with #CollegeofPolicing
The Herald Scotland
6 days ago
- General
- The Herald Scotland
Senior Met officer sacked for second time over refusing drugs test
He was found to have committed gross misconduct by failing to provide a urine sample for a drugs test on July 21 2020, which led to his suspension shortly afterwards. A panel found he had breached professional standards when he refused to provide the sample after being called in to do so in the presence of an assistant commissioner, instead offering to resign on the spot and asking for a meeting with then-commissioner Dame Cressida Dick. Following the PAT's decision to revoke the dismissal, the Met considered a legal challenge by way of a Judicial Review but decided that Mr Bennett should face a fresh misconduct hearing last September. The allegation proven against Mr Bennett was again found at the level of gross misconduct at the latest hearing. The officer, who served in the force from 1976, had remained suspended throughout the process and will now be added to the College of Policing's barred list. Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist said: 'I am enormously concerned that almost five years since this incident happened we have only now been able to dismiss Commander Bennett. 'This should have been a simple matter. Commander Bennett has never disputed he refused a lawful order to take a drugs test. 'As a senior officer who had chaired misconduct hearings, Commander Bennett was highly experienced and knew full well what was required of him, yet he made a choice not to co-operate. 'He has been suspended on full pay for an extraordinary length of time. I am sure Londoners will be as outraged as we are at the utter waste of public funds spent paying a senior officer to sit at home suspended and not work.' Mr Twist said that 'while the Met is not responsible for all the delays in Commander Bennett's matter, we are also working hard to expedite cases and cut bureaucracy', adding: 'I am confident a situation like Commander Bennett's prolonged case would not happen again.' Mr Bennett wrote the Met's drugs strategy for 2017-21 as a commander for territorial policing. The document, called Dealing With The Impact Of Drugs On Communities, set up plans to raise 'awareness of the impact of drug misuse'. He chaired misconduct panels over several years and freedom of information requests showed he presided over 74 misconduct hearings involving 90 officers between June 2010 and February 2012, leading to 56 officers being dismissed.
Spectator
30-05-2025
- Spectator
Why do police accept criminal drug use?
Another day, another sign of the British state's acceptance of criminality. This time it's the news that almost half of people caught in possession of Class A drugs avoid criminal sanction, with the police either issuing a 'community resolution', which does not create a criminal record, or avoid any action at all 'in the public interest'. This represents a dramatic change since 2016, when only 7.5 per cent of those caught in possession of hard drugs avoided prosecution. Why has this happened? And what does it mean for the drugs trade in Britain? In some cases, those avoiding prosecution will be asked to participate in 'diversion schemes', described by the College of Policing as 'discretionary interventions… which aim to reduce subsequent offending by diverting individuals away from traditional criminal justice processes'.
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
What we know about Paul Doyle, the Liverpool parade crash suspect
A 53-year-old man has been charged with seven offences relating to an incident that saw a car plough into a crowd at Liverpool FC's victory parade, injuring dozens. Paul Doyle, from West Derby in Liverpool, will appear at Liverpool Magistrates Court on Friday (30 May), police said. Doyle has been charged with offences including dangerous driving, causing GBH with intent, wounding with intent to cause GBH and attempting to cause GBH with intent. Seven people remained in hospital in a stable condition after the collision, the force announced on Wednesday. It is believed at least 79 people were injured in total, with police revealing on Thursday that the youngest person hurt was nine years old, while the oldest was 78. Police have not revealed any more about the suspect but reports in the media have given more details on who he is. Police typically do not release the identity of a suspect after they have been arrested. In recent years, courts have held that individuals who have been arrested usually have a right to privacy before they are charged with an offence. The College of Policing advise against naming suspects until they are formally charged, except in specific cases – such as when public safety is at risk or to aid an investigation. Additionally, data protection laws, including GDPR, restrict sharing personal information unless justified. Naming someone too early could also prejudice ongoing investigations or future court proceedings by influencing witnesses or public opinion. In high-profile cases, police may delay identification to manage media attention and ensure a fair process. However, once someone is charged, their identity is often made public, as court proceedings are generally open to the public. There was noticeably more information issued by the police immediately after the incident than would normally be expected. This came following criticism levelled at Merseyside Police for their lack of information in the aftermath of the Southport knife attacks last year. One of Merseyside Police's former inspectors, Peter Williams, a senior lecturer in policing at Liverpool John Moores University, said the force had adopted a "complete step change" in how it shares information. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Tuesday: 'It has been a shift, because, particularly in relation to the aftermath of Southport... there was a lot of criticism focused at Merseyside Police and of course the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service], in relation to how the management of information was sort of dealt with.' Williams said that the force may have been mindful of how information was handled by Lancashire Constabulary in the disappearance of Nicola Bulley in January 2023, which led to a College of Policing inquiry. Former Metropolitan Police chief superintendent Dal Babu told BBC Radio 5 Live that the decision to release so much information about the suspect was 'unprecedented'. He said: 'It's remarkably striking because police will not release that kind of information because they'll be worried about prejudicing any future trial, but I think they have to balance that against the potential of public disorder.' Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley also said forces will more often have to release personal details about suspects earlier. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'In general, I think we have to be realistic and more often… put more personal details in public, earlier.' He added that we are in an age of citizen journalism and 'some content will be all over social media very, very quickly' and people will be 'making guesses and inferences' so 'in that world, putting more facts out is the only way to deal with it'.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Live facial recognition cameras may become ‘commonplace' as police use soars
Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become 'commonplace' in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing. Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches. Live facial recognition involves the matching of faces caught on surveillance camera footage against a police watchlist in real time, in what campaigners liken to the continual finger printing of members of the public as they go about their daily lives. Retrospective facial recognition software is used by the police to match images on databases with those caught on CCTV and other systems. According to one funding document drawn up by South Wales police as part of a proposal to put the West End of London or Cardiff rail station under live facial recognition cameras and released by the Metropolitan police under the Freedom of Information Act, it is believed 'the use of this technology could become commonplace in our city centres and transport hubs around England and Wales'. The first fixed live facial recognition cameras will be fitted for a trial in Croydon, south London, later this summer. The expansion comes despite facial recognition failing to be referenced in any act of parliament. Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to 'self regulate' their use of the technology. Officers have in the past used a setting that was subsequently shown to disproportionately misidentify black people. After a court of appeal judgment in 2020, which found that South Wales police's use of live facial recognition cameras had been unlawful, the College of Policing provided guidance that 'the threshold needs to be set with care to maximise the probability of returning true alerts while keeping the false alert rate to an acceptable level'. There remains nothing in law to direct forces on the threshold or technology used. The policing minister, Diane Johnson, told parliament earlier this month that she recognised 'a need to consider whether a bespoke legislative framework governing the use of live facial recognition technology for law enforcement purposes is needed' but the Home Office is yet to provide details. Facial recognition cameras were first trialled in London and south Wales from 2016 but the speed at which police forces are rolling out the technology has accelerated over the last 12 months. The investigation by the Guardian and Liberty found: Police forces scanned nearly 4.7m faces with live facial recognition cameras last year – more than twice as many as in 2023. Live facial recognition vans were deployed at least 256 times in 2024, according to official deployment records, up from 63 the year before. A roving unit of 10 live facial recognition vans that can be sent anywhere in the country will be made available within days – increasing national capacity. Eight police forces have deployed the technology. The Met has four vans. Police forces have considered fixed infrastructure creating a 'zone of safety' by covering the West End of London with a network of live facial recognition cameras. Met officials said this remained a possibility. Forces almost doubled the number of retrospective facial recognition searches made last year using the police national database (PND) from 138,720 in 2023 to 252,798. The PND contains custody mug shots, millions of which have been found to be stored unlawfully of people who have never been charged with or convicted of an offence. More than 1,000 facial recognition searches using the UK passport database were carried out in the last two years, and officers are increasingly searching for matches on the Home Office immigration database, with requests up last year, to 110. Officials have concluded that using the passport database for facial recognition is 'not high risk' and 'is not controversial', according to internal documents. The Home Office is now working with the police to establish a new national facial recognition system, known as strategic facial matcher. The platform will be capable of searching a range of databases including custody images and immigration records. Lindsey Chiswick, the director of intelligence at the Met and the National Police Chiefs' Council lead on facial recognition, said surveys showed that four in five Londoners were in support of the police using innovative technology, including facial recognition cameras. This week, a registered sex offender, David Cheneler, 73, from Lewisham, was jailed for two years after he was caught alone with a six-year-old girl by a live facial recognition camera. He had previously served nine years for 21 offences against children. The Met arrested 587 people in 2024 with the assistance of the live facial recognition cameras of which 424 were charged with offences. Of those arrested, 58 were registered sex offenders in serious breach of their conditions and 38 have been charged. Chiswick said: 'Where there's limited amounts of money and there's fewer officers, but there's more demand, and we see criminals exploiting technology to a really grand scale … we've got to do something different. 'There's an opportunity out there. So policing needs to start operating a little bit differently. People talk about harnessing AI like it's some crazy horse we want to saddle but we do need to harness the opportunities that technology and data can bring us.' Chiswick said the Met's policy was to take 'really quite small steps and review them at every stage' but that there would be a 'benefit in potentially some sort of framework or statutory guidance'. The Met is deploying its facial recognition cameras at a setting that testing suggests avoids any statistical significance in terms of gender or ethnicity bias when it comes to cases of misidentification. Chiswick said: 'I don't want to use a biased algorithm in London. There's no point on all counts. I think for government, there's a question, isn't there around artificial intelligence? And I think clearly the public sector is going to use, and want to use AI more and more. 'I think the questions around who then decides where algorithms are purchased from, what training data is used, what countries might this technology come from and then, when you use it, are you obliged to test it and if you're obliged to test it, are you then obliged to operate at a certain setting? That's not really questions for law enforcement.' A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner's Office said: 'Police use of facial recognition technology can help keep our communities safe – but its use must be fair and proportionate. We are working with police forces to ensure that the technology is effective, and people's rights are protected. Our conversations with the Home Office on the use of the passport database are ongoing and form part of this work.' The Home Office declined a request for comment.
BBC News
23-05-2025
- BBC News
West Midlands PC who dragged woman from home banned from policing
A police officer has been sacked and banned from the profession after dragging a woman from a property and leaving her partially-dressed on the Paul Littler was found guilty of gross misconduct on Wednesday at a hearing arranged by West Midlands Police, following an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).The IOPC said Littler abused his position and treated the woman with "a lack of respect" during the incident in Birmingham in November was dismissed without notice and added to the College of Policing's barred list. At the time of the incident, Littler was already on a final written warning relating to a separate incident. Standards of behaviour The misconduct hearing's disciplinary panel was told that Littler had gone to the property following reports that a tenant was refusing to panel heard that the woman told Littler she had the right to stay at the property and tried to show him evidence on her phone, which he ignored, telling her: "I am the police, I can make up stuff as I go along, can't I?", and: "I've read it, you are still getting dragged out."Littler then handcuffed the woman and dragged her onto the driveway."As she was being dragged outside she told police she was she was a Muslim, hijab-wearing woman, and that she had no trousers on," said IOPC director Derrick Campbell. "The panel agreed this was undignified and that the officer failed to respect her request for modesty."However, the panel did not find Littler had discriminated against the woman because of her allegation that Littler used language suggesting he would abuse his power as a police officer was proven."PC Littler was in a position of trust but he treated the woman with a lack of respect, despite her being at a multi-occupancy property housing people with vulnerabilities."Littler was found to have breached the standards of behaviour governing authority, respect, and courtesy; the use of force; and discreditable IOPC said another officer would also be subject to a misconduct hearing relating to the incident, on a date yet to be determined. Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
