A police officer responsible for managing convicted sex offenders ‘cut-and-pasted’ reports, lied about visiting one offender and failed to check another’s smartphone for three years.
PC Leslie Jones cited an ‘unmanageable’ workload, with the Thames Valley Police officer responsible for managing up to 90 registered sex offenders.
The Home Office recommends that each public protection officer has a caseload of 55 offenders to manage.
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But a panel of three found him guilty of gross misconduct and sacked him from the force.
Chairman of the panel Harry Ireland said: “We found that undoubtedly PC Jones was struggling with his workload.
"We also found that there was a pattern of taking ‘short cuts’ and failing to manage registered sex offenders as expected.”
The barrister added: “Where lesser effort was available he would take it.”
Last year, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary raised concerns that the force did not have the resources in its management of sex and violent offenders (MOSOVO) team to ‘manage demand in a timely way’.
The unit had a ‘backlog of visits’, inspectors said in its evaluation of Thames Valley Police.
“These visits help establish whether or not a sex offender is reoffending or if the risk they pose has changed.”
PC Jones’ misconduct hearing was told that the MOSOVO team’s heavy workload had been exacerbated by officers leaving and being replaced with less experienced staff.
Concerns had been raised with ‘senior members of the constabulary’, it was said.
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The officer’s line manager, who had agreed PC Jones’ workload was ‘unmanageable’, checked the work of the other staff members for whom she was responsible.
“No one else had taken any ‘short cuts’ as alleged against PC Jones and, acknowledging that others were struggling, all had undertaken their work as expected,” the panel said.
He accepted having ‘cut corners’ in his dealings with two other registered sex offenders.
In the case of one, he did ‘little more than cut and paste’ from previous reports on four separate occasions between May 2021 and July 2022.
He failed to check a second sex offender’s phone to make sure software had been installed to monitor his internet use or check his bedroom.
The panel said this was ‘inexplicable’, given PC Jones himself described the man as a ‘compulsive liar’ and ‘difficult to manage’.
And he lied about visiting another sex offender, writing fictitious reports detailing how the man was supposedly in 'good spirits for a change'.
The panel said PC Jones' claim he had made a mistake was 'unpersuasive'.
The panel found PC Jones, who was based at Windsor police station, breached professional standards of behaviour and was guilty of gross misconduct.
He was dismissed without notice.
Thames Valley Police was approached for comment.
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