Kentish Express Ashford & District
Child-porn officer due to be sentenced
A disgraced former police inspector facing prison for making and sharing child porn was due to find out his fate yesterday (Wednesday).
Inspector Timothy Ryton, f ormerly of Folkestone, has been on bail since January and was sentenced at Lewes Crown Court in East Sussex.
The supervisory officer, who had 25 years’ service at Kent Police, was sacked by the force earlier this month for gross misconduct.
He pleaded guilty to nine charges of voyeurism and making and sharing videos and images of children when he appeared at Crawley Magistrates’ Court in March.
De t e c t i v e s from Greater Manchester Police alerted Kent Police about information they had received from an investigation focusing on Stockport.
Ryton, who worked in the control room at Kent Police HQ in Maidstone, was arrested in January and immediately suspended pending an internal investigation.
Det Supt John McDermott, who led the investigation for the Kent Police professional standards department, gave examples of the kind of material Ryton had been sharing, which included sexual abuse of girls aged between seven and 11.
He said footage deleted from Ryton’s phone and recovered by investigators was “exactly the same” as that posted online.