Rookie WPC faces sack over stalking
Graduate harassed ‘ex’ months after joining force
A YOUNG policewoman is facing the sack after being convicted of stalking within months of starting the job.
PC Emma Bewick was handed a ten-week suspended sentence after she repeatedly called at victim Gavin Burrows’ home and workplace.
Bewick started her job with South Wales Police after graduating six months ago.
But the 21-year-old, who studied policing at the University of South Wales, could now see her career in tatters after she was convicted of stalking Mr Burrows – reportedly an ex-boyfriend.
Cwmbran Magistrates’ Court heard that the officer carried out ‘a course of unwanted contact’ with the victim, which she ‘knew or ought to have known amounted to harassment’.
This included turning up at his home ‘unannounced’ and calling ‘at places where he frequents’, prosecutors told the court.
A source told MailOnline that Bewick, from Pontyclun in South Wales, met Mr Burrows earlier this year and had a brief relationship with him which ended shortly before she joined the force.
She admitted stalking without fear, alarm or distress between October 7 and 25 at Talbot Green, South Wales. Bewick, who will appear at the force’s headquarters today, now faces an accelerated misconduct hearing where she is accused of ‘discreditable conduct’.
The charge against her states that she is ‘alleged to have breached the Standards of Professional Behaviour in relation to Standard 5 Orders and Instructions and Standard 9 Discreditable Conduct, following her arrest and conviction for harassment’.
The case is just the latest in a string of embarrassments for South Wales Police. Last month, a misconduct hearing was told that PC Andrew Legg had used the force’s vehicles to meet a woman for sex in a park while on duty. The PC used an unmarked car to meet the woman outside a Home Bargains shop near her home before driving to Porthkerry Country Park, in Barry, South Wales, where they had sex.
The pair then slept together again two weeks later when the on-duty officer drove to her house on a police motorbike. Anti-corruption officers found messages between the two in which he told the woman he ‘worked in uniform with handcuffs’. She later messaged: ‘I love a man in uniform.’
PC Legg, who admitted gross misconduct, resigned five days before his disciplinary hearing. However, a representative said he wanted to ‘apologise for the embarrassment caused’.
‘Turning up unannounced’