Spared the sack, police who joked about raping victims of crime
A GROUP of Scotland Yard officers who joked about raping crime victims and exchanged racist, homophobic and misogynistic messages have been allowed to keep their jobs.
Nearly three years after the Daily Mail revealed the vile messages, five officers have been let off with written warnings for misconduct.
The scandal was exposed after the Mail obtained the disturbing contents of a phone belonging to an award-winning firearms officer, PC Edward Bengree.
It revealed discussions between officers about demanding oral sex from a ‘ hot s*** victim of crime’ in exchange for filing a crime report on the woman’s ordeal.
The 38-year- old armed officer who worked at Heathrow was found to have secretly recorded suspects while they were in custody and in the back of a police car.
PC Bengree, pictured, also ‘endeavoured to develop an inappropriate relationship with a vulnerable female victim of crime’ and accessed confidential information about her in order to pursue her.
The officer was once hailed by former Deputy Commissioner Craig Mackey as a ‘fantastic example of the values we hold dear within the Metropolitan Police Service’ after he received a bravery award for saving the life of a boy who had stopped breathing.
But last Thursday he was found by a police disciplinary panel to have committed gross misconduct. However, astonishingly, the Metropolitan Police decided that he and his colleagues – Detective Constable John Taylor, from Specialist Crime; PC Christopher Davey, from the Aviation Policing Command; and PC Matthew Hewett and PC David Donovan, from the South West Basic Command Unit – should not be sacked.
The three-day misconduct hearing panel concluded that PC Bengree, PC Hewett and PC Donovan should receive final written warnings for gross misconduct. PC Davey and DC Taylor were issued with written warnings for misconduct.
The officers were involved in exchanging racist messages, degrading slurs about female victims of crime and offensive comments about homosexuals and disabled people. PC Bengree and DC Taylor discussed getting victims of crime into the back of a police van and sexually assaulting them. DC Taylor wrote: ‘Bring on our next night duty in the van. Victim. Hot. I get to choose.’ In other messages the pair chatted about DC Taylor having sex with a stripper who had been arrested two months earlier. Investigators found scores of racist messages on PC Bengree’s phone in conversations with fellow officers and friends in which black people were referred to ‘w***’. PC Hewett joked with his father: ‘How many Metropolitan police officers does it take to push a black man down the stairs?... None, he fell.’
During the London riots in 2011, PC Bengree said he was ‘so upset’ he was not there after his brother said: ‘It’s pretty much “feel free to hit [rioters] with batons” time.’
The messages, sent between 2009 and 2011, were only uncovered due to a mix-up in an unrelated court case, when the contents of PC Bengree’s phone were handed over to lawyers by mistake.
In a disclosure blunder, prosecutors accidentally gave the material to lawyers acting for a Surrey businessman in a case that has since collapsed. The contents of the phone had been backed up on a laptop recovered as part of police searches in the case.
After the Mail exposé, Scotland Yard and the Independent Office for Police Conduct launched a misconduct inquiry in January 2018.