Steve Dunn
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A police officer charged with dangerous driving after a man was hit and injured at a pedestrian crossing in Lincoln city centre has been sentenced. PC Aodan O'Neill, 27, previously admitted driving a marked police car dangerously on Broadgate on 4 November 2024. O'Neill was sentenced to a 12-month community order, to include 150 hours of unpaid work, at Nottingham Crown Court earlier. The officer was also banned from driving for 12 months and will need to take an extended retest. According to Lincolnshire Police, O'Neill had been travelling to an emergency incident with blue lights and sirens activated when the marked car he was driving struck a man crossing the road. The man was not seriously injured, police said. Following the hearing, the force said it would now consider internal misconduct proceedings. O'Neill is currently on non-operational duties. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…



'Have you ever been invited in by the Met Police?' - @SkySarahJane Gender Equality Campaigner Patsy Stevenson says she has never been invited by the Metropolitan Police to help with education or cultural change, despite her campaigning work.












A former police officer who took selfies at the scene of a teenager’s death is not guilty of misconduct in a public office, a judge has ruled. Ryan Connolly, 41, was cleared of four charges after Recorder of Manchester Judge Nicholas Dean KC discharged the jury part way through a trial at Manchester Crown Court. Judge Dean ruled the prosecution’s evidence could not amount to proving Connolly committed misconduct and it would not be legal for a jury to consider verdicts on the charges. He told the court: “My conclusion is the Crown cannot demonstrate the serious misconduct here, that the evidence is incapable of demonstrating serious misconduct, so the jury could not reach a conclusion so that Mr Connolly was guilty of misconduct in a public office.” He ordered not guilty verdicts to be recorded on Friday, on the fifth day of the trial which began on Monday. Prosecutors have until Monday to consider whether to appeal against the ruling. Jurors had heard that Connolly, a Constable with Merseyside Police, took selfies, including one lying on the grass, when he was deployed to guard a cordon after 16-year-old Daniel Gee-Jamieson was killed in Belle Vale, Liverpool, in 2018. More than 50 photos, including pictures of vulnerable people detained at hospitals as well as images of force systems and Connolly’s colleagues, were found in the sent folder of WhatsApp on his personal phone when he was arrested in February 2020, the court heard. Opening the trial on Tuesday, Peter Wilson, prosecuting, said: “The prosecution say he has wilfully misconducted himself by taking inappropriate photographs where, we say, there is no professional need to do so. He’s then retained them and sent them on.” But the court heard that with the exception of one photo, sent to a supervising officer, there was no evidence of who Connolly sent the pictures to. No messages accompanying the images had been retrieved from the phone. The jury was told the defendant claimed the images were taken for work purposes, but the court heard they had not been uploaded to police systems. At the hearing on Friday, a note from one juror had asked the court to explain why the defendant had taken the photos, adding: “What was he getting out of it?” Judge Dean told jurors that misconduct in a public office is one of the few remaining common law offences which is hard to define and is often a form of corruption. He gave the example of police officers sometimes being prosecuted for tipping off criminals about police investigations for money – but nothing like that had been suggested in Connolly’s case. However Connolly, from Huyton, Merseyside, will be back at the same court on Monday to be sentenced for three counts of possession of extreme pornographic images which he previously admitted. He was formally dismissed in 2021 by Merseyside Police, who described his behaviour as “deplorable”. A misconduct hearing was told other images found on his phone were racist, homophobic and mocked disabled people, and messages showed he socialised with a known criminal. Link to the article: itv.com/news/granada/2…


Today the City of London Police Domestic Corruption Unit made arrests in connection with a criminal investigation into allegations of fraud made against three individuals connected to the national Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW). Read more: bit.ly/3NdKB0I


The Oxford student who chanted ‘put the Zios in the ground’ will not go on trial for two years. People accused of racist incitement after Southport (some for social media posts) were fast-tracked into court, convicted and in prison in days or weeks. How can this be the case when the Attorney General said claims that the UK has two-tier justice were ‘disgusting’? bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…


















