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Are convicted criminals policing us?

Rachel Bedgood

Officer used police database to draw up list and target victims as young as eight

CALLS for a external police criminal check for forces across the UK to in future have been made after an officer of more than 30 years’ standing was found to have committed 40 sexually related offences against children as young as eight years old.

Police constable Allan Richards used the police database to access information about young men and kept a list of boys that he was attracted to before assaulting them at scout camps, swimming pools and other locations, even telling some victims he was touching them in order to eliminate them from a criminal investigation.

And yet the former West Midlands force employee has only just been convicted of his crimes, which took place between 1976 and 2013, after a thorough investigation took place in 2014 – some 14 years after concerns regarding his conduct were first raised in 2000.

Making a change

Now leading UK employment screening agency, Complete Background Screening (CBS), is calling for background checks within all police forces to be conducted externally moving forward, in a bid to ensure such a scenario can never be repeated.

CBS CEO Rachel Bedgood said: “As a nation, we trust in our police forces to keep us safe, particularly at our most vulnerable moments, but Allan Richards completely abused his position in order to take advantage of the young men he was supposed to protect.

“What shocks me the most is that complaints were made against Richards twice before he was thoroughly investigated by the police force in 2014, and unfortunately similar situations  which have ultimately allowed criminals to remain in the police force are also known to exist.

“I believe that background checks for police officers should therefore be conducted externally in future, to ensure that no checks are biased and that any investigations of this nature should not be allowed to slip under the radar as easily as the Richards case evidently did.”

At present, all UK police checks are conducted internally, with prospective officers required to go through a screening process where they are checked against the Police National Computer to verify their identity and background.

Candidates must also include the name of referees who can provide supporting evidence about character and employment history, with all officers required to have a clear criminal record to ensure that they are suitable for a job role.

Issues still need addressing

Despite this, in 2015 it was reported that 309 police officers and police community support officers in the UK had been convicted of crimes since 2012, which included sex offences against both adults and children, assaults and possession of indecent images of children. However, only 25 out of 45 police forces actually disclosed these statistics when asked, meaning such figures could be significantly higher in reality.

In the same period, the Met Police alone said 178 of its officers were convicted of criminal offences, while shocking figures released in February 2016 revealed that more than half of Met Police officers convicted of offences in the past 10 years still work for the force. 685 officers in the London force have been convicted of crimes since 2005, with 343 of those officers remaining in police employment, although mostly those with minor traffic convictions were allowed to remain.

Overall, statistics show that between 2010 and 2015 one police officer per day was arrested on average in the UK on suspicion of some kind of criminal offence.  In total, 1,629 officers were arrested in the UK during this period on suspicion of crimes including assault, grievous bodily harm and manslaughter. 500 of these were convicted of offences or suspended from duty.

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