A former Metropolitan Police officer says she has acquired lots of of hate messages since being banned from policing over her dealing with of two incidents of flashing by Wayne Couzens.
Samantha Lee didn’t make “the correct investigative inquiries” into the offences, the place Couzens uncovered himself to feminine employees at a McDonalds restaurant in Kent in late February 2021, a disciplinary panel discovered.
The two incidents befell simply days earlier than he kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard.
Her failure to correctly examine and the mendacity about her actions have been discovered to be gross misconduct, leading to her being banned from any police power in future.
Ms Lee, 29, stated she felt like she was being “blamed completely” for Ms Everard’s loss of life, and that she had acquired messages from individuals saying she ought to have been the one kidnapped and murdered.
She informed BBC Newsnight: “I think I’m seen as this horrendous, awful person that has let an absolutely heinous crime take place. And I’m being looked at as if I’m just as guilty as what Couzens is.
“But actually, there was nothing that I might have accomplished that will have modified the end result.
“I do not need any sympathy in any respect. All I need is individuals simply to know that there’s nothing that I might have accomplished.
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“It has been a case of ‘let’s go in at the bottom’ rather than going up higher at the top.
“The solely person who needs to be blamed for that terrible, terrible, horrendous crime needs to be Wayne Couzens.”
The tribunal heard she had been despatched to the McDonalds in Swanley on 3 March 2021, interviewing the supervisor Sam Taylor simply hours earlier than Couzens kidnapped Ms Everard from Clapham in southwest London.
Ms Lee stated she believed the restaurant’s CCTV was deleted mechanically, so there could be no footage of Couzens of the offence, however Mr Taylor stated he had proven her the footage and informed her it may very well be saved on a USB stick.
He additionally stated he had informed her the registration plate on Couzens’s car may very well be seen within the CCTV footage of the second incident.
Ms Lee stated after the ruling that she had been made a “scapegoat”, including: “I am a young female PC and I am the only person who has faced any disciplinary action in relation to this.
“There is just one one that is accountable for the whole lot that occurred and that’s Wayne Couzens.
“I have never lied.”
Couzens was sentenced in March this yr to 19 months in jail over three counts of indecent publicity – the 2 at McDonalds and one the place he uncovered himself to a feminine bicycle owner in Kent in November 2020.
When he was sentenced he was already serving life behind bars for what he did to Ms Everard.
Source: information.sky.com”
