Met Police tutor dismissed after biting student on neck and touching her thigh
Pc Chris Lee, who was a street duties instructor/tutor on one of the force's Borough Command Units, also touched the bottom of the student's back in a pub just three weeks into her course, a misconduct panel said.
He then texted the student after an end of course drinks event saying it was 'important to have a good time at work' and that she 'just didn't get' his behaviour.
Pc Lee had joined the Met in 2018, while the student was working on the unit and had began her course in October 2021.
There was a 'jovial culture' on the unit with tutors and students often going out for drinks together, as was the case when they went to the pub after work on November 5 2021, the panel said.
Pc Lee first put his hand on the student's thigh while she was sitting next to him in the pub.
As she then leaned across him later in the evening, the tutor then bit her on the left side of her neck, causing the student to say 'he just bit me', the panel said.
The student later said in evidence that the bite was 'not that hard' and did not leave a mark, but that she had 'felt teeth not lips'.
The tutor stated in evidence that he had consumed six or seven pints of beer that evening, and was drunk at the time of the incidents but still 'bodily capable'.
A Metropolitan Police sign on the side of a London Metropolitan police motorcycle (Andrew Matthews/PA)
He accepted he had touched the student's thigh and kissed her on the neck, but denied touching her back and biting her.
But the panel found both of the disputed allegations proven on the balance of probabilities, and that Pc Lee's conduct was sexual and inappropriate in nature as he was attracted to the student.
A discussion involving Pc Lee and the student about favourite tutors then took place at the end of course drinks several weeks later, again at a pub, on December 3 2021, the panel said.
When his name was not mentioned, the tutor said to the student 'What did you just say', 'Who are your favourite tutors', and 'We got you your IPS (Independent Patrol Status) they didn't'.
The following day, Pc Lee sent the student a text about the discussion which said: 'I'm sorry you felt we were rude but we were not intentionally, that's our personalities together and I think it's important to have a good time at work.
'At no point did we every say anything rude against you and I'm sorry you felt that we were rude.
'You just didn't get us which is fine.'
The comments made by Pc Lee towards the student at the pub were found by the panel to be humiliating for her.
They found the tutor's overall behaviour in both incidents together amounted to gross misconduct, as it breached the force's Standards of Professional Behaviour.
Pc Lee was subsequently dismissed without notice at a misconduct hearing and placed on the College of Policing barred list.
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Scottish Sun
29 minutes ago
- Scottish Sun
I spent weeks identifying 7/7 victims – the atrocity still haunts me 20 years on
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Times
10 hours ago
- Times
7/7 as it happened — by the reporter who covered it for a month
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He seemed relaxed and told reporters: 'At the moment casualties appear to be very low … the bombs appear to be smaller than on the last occasion.' He told people to stay where they were and go about their normal business. Behind him in the street people wandered past seemingly unconcerned or unaware of what was going on. In Downing Street the prime minister, Tony Blair, who was hosting his Australian counterpart, John Howard, said the police and security services had things under control. He didn't want to minimise the seriousness of the new attacks but said it was important people reacted calmly. He was going back to his scheduled meetings. The commissioner made another statement shortly afterwards, saying the situation was fully under control: there had been four failed bombings that day and one non-fatal casualty. Our presenter Anna Botting concluded: 'As far as Sir Ian Blair and Tony Blair are concerned, incident over.' Police had the failed bombers' DNA, fingerprints, CCTV images and their bombs. They hoped to establish where they had bought their rucksacks. I stressed the urgency of the manhunt but reported that detectives were confident of catching them. I was still on the Scotland Yard pavement. I didn't know that police had already located a man they thought was one of the suspects after linking images and more gym cards from the scene to a flat in south London. When he left the building undercover armed police followed him to Stockwell Tube station. Around midday I had a call from Peter Rose, a former Fleet Street crime reporter who was now working freelance and had better contacts than me. 'Hi Brunty,' he said quite calmly, 'they've shot dead one of the wanted bombers at Stockwell Tube.' I hesitated to report it straight away. Could I be sure Peter was right? It would be a big thing for me to get wrong. I needed another source. My rivals along the street were chatting among themselves, so they obviously hadn't had the same tip. I started ringing contacts to corroborate the story. A few minutes later a senior detective I knew walked past and without breaking his stride said to me in little more than a whisper: 'Have you heard? We've shot one of the suicide bombers.' He was gone before I could mutter my thanks. I took a deep breath and reported what I knew, live on air. There wasn't much detail but it was huge news — I said I understood police had shot dead a man they believed was one of the failed bombers. I sensed other reporters stop talking and lean in to catch what I was saying. Before I'd finished speaking I could hear their phones ringing. The next few hours were pretty chaotic. At the afternoon press conference Sir Ian Blair said the dead suspect was linked directly to the ongoing investigation. He understood the man was challenged by armed police and refused to obey. His press office told reporters the suspect had jumped the station barrier. It turned out all of that was wrong. The next day police revealed they knew the man's identity and confirmed he was not one of the failed bombers. Later they named him as the Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes. He was 27. We didn't know all the details, but he was the tragic victim of mistaken identity and poor communications amid the heightened fear of another terror attack. So ended one of the bleakest days in Scotland Yard's history. I had a foreign holiday booked to Florida in two days' time, but I was still outside the Yard reporting on the manhunt. I warned my family they may have to go without me. The bomber Yassin Hassan Omar, whose device failed to ignite at Warren Street station, had been arrested two days earlier in Birmingham. It emerged later that he'd escaped London dressed in a burqa. Around 10am a viewer in west London called to say there was a lot of police activity nearby and that residents of a block of flats were being evacuated. And yes, she let us put a camera crew into her flat overlooking the scene. Police confirmed they had an operation going on. I didn't tell them we had a great view of it. We were soon broadcasting live pictures of the unfolding drama: roadblocks, streets lined with police, fire and ambulance vehicles and people being hurried away. When we showed firearms officers putting on full body armour and balaclavas ready for a raid, there was uproar at Scotland Yard. Hayman, the assistant commissioner, rang me asking — no, insisting — that we stop live coverage immediately. He didn't tell me exactly what was going on, but explained that if someone in the flat they were monitoring was watching our pictures of the police tooling up, they might just detonate a bomb. We stopped our live broadcast but filmed what happened for later use. After a two-hour stand-off, two of the failed bombers, Muktar Said Ibrahim and Ramzi Mohammed, were arrested at the flat. That night we ran footage of one being led away and audio of police shouting commands earlier for the suspects to give themselves up. They obeyed and emerged in their underpants, as instructed, with their hands raised. A few hours later the fourth failed bomber, Hussain Osman, was arrested in Rome. It had been an extraordinary three weeks and the biggest police investigation in Britain. It was far from over, but I was finally released from my spot and joined my family for our holiday. When I returned two weeks later I covered the early court appearances of the would-be bombers. When I interviewed Sir Ian Blair on his resignation three years later, he said he considered Jean Charles de Menezes to be the 53rd victim of the terrorists, adding: 'I'm deeply sorry about his death.' The episode had clearly blighted his time as Britain's top cop. He endeared himself to me when a BBC documentary interviewer asked him what was the first thing he did when he was told of the 7/7 bombings. 'I did what everyone else did,' he replied, 'I turned on Sky News.' To their credit, the Beeb producers kept his words in. In the wake of 7/7, Tony Blair declared: 'The rules of the game are changing.' His government hurried in new counterterror laws in anticipation of more attacks. MI5 embarked on a huge recruitment drive with a 50 per cent boost to its funding agreed before 7/7. More tragedies came: a car bomb at Glasgow airport, the murder of the soldier Lee Rigby, stabbings on London Bridge, the killing of pedestrians and a policeman in Westminster, the Manchester Arena blast. And I've reported on them all — usually from the pavement outside Scotland Brunt has been the Sky News crime correspondent since 1994. He is the author of No One Got Cracked Over the Head for No Reason: Dispatches from a Crime Reporter (Biteback £10.99). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Telegraph
14 hours ago
- Telegraph
Palestine Action are not terrorists. The RAF is just grossly incompetent
One can see why the Government is proposing to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. That anyone could enter the RAF base at Brize Norton, one of the most significant we have, and smear red paint on planes was deeply humiliating. Once, the commanding officer of the base would have resigned immediately; the security officer would have been moved to the cookhouse, if he was lucky; and the Defence Secretary would have offered his resignation. But no-one resigns these days, so branding the intruders 'terrorists', as if they were some ruthless group trained to outwit military professionals, with death and destruction their aim, makes them sound all the more formidable, and their victims all the more helpless. It is an unconvincing cover for the sort of grotesque incompetence that characterises our public sector and public services. That was the RAF; the next day it was the Metropolitan Police unable to prevent an epidemic of daylight robbery on the streets of the West End; the next NHS maternity services that humiliate and degrade women giving birth. What Palestine Action, however organised and bonkers and loathsome they are, did was not terrorism: it was vandalism. You might as well call football hooligans terrorists, or the groups of louts who on hot summer evenings riot because they are bored and the police upset them by seeking to restore order. Terrorism is a truly abhorrent, lethal, wicked and repulsive thing: chucking paint over planes and ridiculing the RAF and the Government in the process does not even begin to compare with it. This devaluation of a word with a precise meaning is highly dangerous. Lord (Toby) Young, in his excellent work for the Free Speech Union, has disclosed that Prevent – the increasingly preposterous, Left-leaning body that tries to stop terrorism at its roots – has done research that suggests 'red flags' for spotting potential far-right terrorists are people who like, among other things, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, GK Chesterton's poems, The Bridge On the River Kwai, The Dam Busters and Yes, Minister. Where do I give myself up? Many of us remember real terrorism, perpetrated by real terrorists: the Birmingham and Guildford Bombings; the Hyde Park Bombings; murders in Manchester, both by the IRA in 1992 and 1996 and, a generation later, an Islamic extremist who killed 22 at the city's Arena in 2017; the massacre on 7/7, which killed 52 innocent people in 2005; and if that's not enough, Lockerbie. I could go on. Does all that utter horror compare with exposing the pitiful security at Brize Norton and slapping paint on planes? Of course not. This seemed to start in 2016, after the abominable murder of Jo Cox, the Labour MP, by Thomas Mair, a recluse and weirdo unknown to the authorities. He was rapidly branded a 'terrorist' by politicians when it became clear he had a deeply unhealthy obsession with the far-right and its doctrines. He was a member of no terrorist organisation. What he did was appalling, but he was no more a terrorist than any politically-motivated psychopath acting alone. Ms Cox's murder came days before the Brexit vote. Those who branded Mair a 'terrorist' (and the authorities rapidly followed suit) were surely not trying to associate him with the Brexit movement – were they? On Friday, four people were arrested over the Brize Norton incident. If convicted, they must suffer exemplary punishment. However, I hope the Government accepts its responsibilities for such pathetic security. And I also hope that in future it reserves the term 'terrorist' for those who really merit it, rather than diluting it for idiotic troublemakers or lethal misfits.
