Police officer handed instant dismissal over nightclub lies
MISCONDUCT VERDICT AFTER PC ABUSED POSITION OF AUTHORITY
A police constable has been sacked after she lied about a drunken confrontation in a nightclub during an evening out with family and friends.
Leicestershire officer Hollie-May Woods, who was off duty at the time, claimed staff were homophobic and had shoved her in the face.
But an internal misconduct hearing over five days has ruled her story was fabricated.
On the night of the incident she had been out drinking with her brother and others, arriving at Popworld, in Nuneaton, at about 11pm.
About three hours later there was some shoving on the dancefloor and Pc Woods’s brother, Thomas, who was judged by doorstaff to be “the aggressor”, was pulled out of the club by two bouncers as Pc Woods tried to stop them.
Pc Woods called Warwickshire Police on 101 and, as well as claiming she was pushed in the face, told the force her brother was ejected for being gay and held by the throat.
The physical assault claims were contradicted by CCTV evidence.
A hearing at Leicestershire Police HQ in Enderby began on Monday last week, with Pc Woods being accused of gross misconduct over her behaviour at the club in the early hours of Sunday, May 1 last year.
The force said the panel had found the case proven and that she had been dismissed.
Daniel Penman, the lawyer for the force, told the hearing on its opening day that Pc Woods had breached police behaviour standards by wrongly intervening in her brother’s ejection from the club, behaving inappropriately towards the door staff, reporting them to the police without grounds and abusing her authority as a police officer.
It was also argued that she had lied about the homophobic nature of her brother’s ejection to “artificially escalate” the Warwickshire Police response to her complaints in a way that was “dishonest or lacked integrity”.
Recordings of her call were played at the hearing and she was heard to say her brother had been the victim of a homophobic incident.
She also said: “They grabbed him by the throat and dragged him out and I tried to stop them and they pushed me by my face. They pushed me by my right eye.”
Two police officers arrived later and spoke to Pc Woods but, after looking at club CCTV and speaking to door staff, they decided no investigation was necessary into either the alleged hate crime or the reported assault on Pc Woods.
The two Warwickshire officers who spoke to Pc Woods later described her as being “unsteady on her feet” and “slurring her words”.
In a statement about the outcome of the hearing, Leicestershire Police said: “A police constable has been dismissed having been found to have breached the standards of professional behaviour, namely discreditable conduct; authority, respect and courtesy; honesty and integrity.
“At a hearing last week, the panel heard that Pc Hollie-May Woods had been off duty and socialising with a group at a nightclub in Nuneaton when one of the group was physically removed from the premises by door staff following an incident.
“It was alleged that as the group member was being removed from the premises, Pc Woods intervened and was verbally aggressive and confrontational towards door staff.
“It was also alleged that Pc Woods identified herself as a police officer during the incident in an attempt to abuse her position of authority and deliberately sought to escalate the severity of the incident in a report to the police using her police knowledge to do so.
“The panel found the allegations were proven and that Pc Woods’s conduct was so serious that it amounted to gross misconduct. Pc Woods was dismissed without notice.”