Seven years ago last weekend, Novlett Williams' life changed forever.
Williams, known to her friends and colleagues as Robyn, was then a temporary chief superintendent in the Metropolitan Police and one of the country's most senior Black female officers. She'd served in policing for over three decades, had an exemplary disciplinary record, been awarded the prestigious Queen's Policing Medal in 2003 and received a commendation for her work with communities affected by the Grenfell Tower fire.
But that February weekend in 2018, Williams made a terrible error of judgement. She failed to report that she'd been sent a video clip on her smartphone showing a young girl being sexually abused. The footage, lasting 54 seconds, had been sent by Williams' sister and was received by 16 other people as well. One of them alerted police and an investigation was launched.
Williams claimed that she wasn't aware she'd been sent the video, but she was charged and after a trial at the Old Bailey found guilty of possessing an indecent image of a child and sentenced to carry out 200 hours' unpaid work. The Court of Appeal later upheld her conviction.
If the case sounds familiar to readers of my occasional blog that's because I've written about it before, in particular about the Met's efforts to ensure Williams never worked for the force again. Their first attempt came just before lockdown, in March 2020, when the Met's then Assistant Commissioner Helen Ball chaired a disciplinary hearing. She found that Williams' actions had amounted to "gross misconduct" which "threatened" public confidence and the reputation of the police service. She was sacked.
But Williams wasn't out of the Met for long. Fifteen months later, the decision to dismiss her was overturned by the Police Appeals Tribunal (PAT) which said Ball's reasoning was "thin" and her conclusion "unreasonable". The Tribunal ordered Williams to be reinstated and imposed a final written warning instead.
The Met refused to give up and challenged the Tribunal's decision in the High Court, only to see their case swatted aside by Mrs Justice Heather Williams. She said the PAT had applied the correct legal approach and reached a "permissible" conclusion because of the "unique circumstances of the conviction, the officer’s stellar career, the substantial impact she had had on enhancing the reputation of the {Met} as a whole and its assessment that her dismissal would reduce confidence in the police in some of the communities in which the {Met} had struggled to gain trust." The force tried to appeal against the judge's ruling - but again they were unsuccessful.
And so Williams continued to work at the Met. Some friends advised her to quit, fearing her life would be made very difficult, but she was determined to carry on. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake.
Although it was accepted that there was no sexual element to her offending, Williams had been ordered to register as a sex offender for five years, as part of her sentence. It meant she had to give police certain information and update them when details changed; it's known as the sex offender 'notification regime'. In 2023, the Met accused her of failing to comply with the notification rules - and she was charged. It was alleged that she hadn't told police about bank accounts and a debit card, as well as an overseas trip she'd made, to Kenya, in December 2021.
In April 2024, on the day Williams was due to stand trial for allegedly breaching the notification rules, the case was dropped. The Prosecution said it was not in the public interest to continue because of her poor mental health. Williams, by then 59, had been off sick for months and had finally resigned from the Met. Judge Richard Marks KC - who had sentenced the former superintendent originally and was due to preside at her second trial - said he could "well imagine her being completely traumatised by the conviction".
That, however, is not the end of it. Last week, it emerged that Williams is suing Scotland Yard over the way she has been treated for the last seven years, alleging that the force victimised her and discriminated against her because she is a Black woman. The details are set out in a preliminary ruling on legal issues by Judge Rachel Mellor at the London Central Employment Tribunal.
First, Williams complains about the way the abuse images case was dealt with by the Met in 2018 and 2019. She says the detective handling the matter treated her as a suspect rather than a witness, recommended she should face criminal prosecution rather than internal misconduct proceedings and sought to impose bail conditions on her when she appeared before magistrates.
The second part of Williams' legal action revolves around the more recent allegations that she breached sex offender notification rules. She claims she had eight additional requirements imposed on her, was "disproportionately" pursued over alleged notification errors following the Kenya trip and was "pressur{ed}" into taking a caution "in circumstances where this did not occur with white and or male officers".
Williams also accuses the Met of failing to pay her "appropriate back pay or consider alternative solutions" after she won her PAT appeal and has lodged a claim of constructive dismissal. Scotland Yard, according to the Tribunal document, is resisting the claims "in their entirety".
It's a daunting prospect for anyone to take their boss to court - even more so where the employers are the Met Police with a budget of £3.5 billion, a formidable legal department and a history of going to great lengths to protect their reputation. So the odds are stacked against Robyn Williams from the outset. Proving discrimination is additionally challenging but Williams, the document says, will cite cases involving other officers, to show that she has been unfairly treated: "The claimant {Williams} feels the actions taken against her were disproportionate to her role in any crime and were treated far more seriously than many of her male and/or white colleagues. Although there is no direct comparator the claimant indicates she will rely on white male evidential comparators who were not subjected to the same or similar treatment despite committing more serious misconduct."
Among the cases Williams could point to is that of a White policeman who was jailed in 2023 for a series of violent and degrading sexual offences against women. The officer, who can't be named for legal reasons, had come to the notice of the Met and other forces nine times over almost 20 years. The Independent Office for Police Conduct has been investigating why the man was able to continue serving despite concerns about his behaviour and has launched disciplinary proceedings against four officers and a member of police staff.
Williams might also question why Scotland Yard allowed another male officer to join the force after he'd just been investigated for rape - all this at the same time as the Met was pursuing her through the courts. Cliff Mitchell, who is Black, was recruited in 2021 and later carried on in his role despite being made the subject of a non-molestation order. In 2024 he was convicted of 10 counts of rape, including offences against a child, and kidnap.
And comparisons could be made between Williams' case and that of a serving Met officer who'd been arrested for rape in June 2021. After his arrest, it took nine months before PC Samuel McGregor, who is White, was even suspended from duty. He was convicted last month and is awaiting sentence but as of this week, he is still employed by the Met.
None of these cases is the same as Williams' - it's impossible to find an exact match because hers was so unusual - but they illustrate the inconsistencies of Scotland Yard's approach. In an interim report on the Met in October 2022, Baroness (Louise) Casey of Blackstock found that "repeated or escalating misconduct is not spotted, missing those who potentially pose most risk to others". Her research identified 24 instances where previous allegations of sexual misconduct or domestic abuse had not been taken into account when a new complaint was made. Three anonymised cases were highlighted in the report where officers had been investigated for misconduct multiple times and received sanctions short of dismissal. It makes for shocking reading.
Of particular relevance to Williams' claims of discrimination may be Casey's conclusion that "the Met’s misconduct system has evidence of racial disparity...White officers and staff continue to fare better than their Black, Asian or Mixed Ethnicity counterparts." Those who were consulted for the review reported that the system was "not sufficiently robust with White officers who breach professional standards" whereas those from ethnic minority backgrounds faced a "lower threshold".
If Williams' case isn't settled before a full hearing, these examples and findings will provide powerful backing at the Tribunal for her argument that she was treated differently to others (though that does not guarantee success). I do not defend what she did seven years ago, nor dispute the jury's verdict, but Scotland Yard's determination to root her out of the force, particularly after she'd won her appeal, is completely at odds with the way it dealt with other officers whose conduct was so much worse. And that begs the question: why?
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