THE CREEP
Cover Up in Undercover Met Unit Protecting Women From Predators
This summer, in great secrecy, a police discipline panel found a constable guilty of being a sex pest after he propositioned a teenage schoolgirl.
The 17-year-old was a victim of crime he was supposed to be protecting. Instead, the 32-year-old officer messaged her via Facebook saying she “owed” him for delivering her safely to her parents and they should go for a drink.
The schoolgirl didn’t accept his offer, but nor did she forget the encounter with the “creepy” cop as she grew up.
Thirteen years later, amid the fall out over the rape and murder of Sarah Everard that had led the Met to confront its predator in uniform problem, she reported the creep to the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC).
By then he had transferred to City of London police. During a discipline interview, the constable claimed he was just being a good ambassador for policing, that he called women of all ages “missy” and normally signed off his texts with a kiss.
However, he didn’t stick around to try out the defence at his discipline hearing for gross misconduct and resigned from the police this March.
Although he refused to attend the hearing in July, fantastically, he did ask to remain anonymous and in the shadows, which City of London police supported.
The discipline panel was chaired by a male police commander sitting with three women - two of them independent civilian members and a legal adviser.
The women were told that apart from the historic aberration with the teenage schoolgirl in 2010, this was a well-respected cop with no allegations of a similar nature since.
That was not true.
An investigation by The Upsetter can reveal that City of London Police misled the civilian members of the panel and the legal adviser.
The anti-corruption squad did not disclose that it was also investigating the officer for more recent and far more serious allegations of sexual misconduct involving a second young woman he also called “missy”.
That investigation concerned the period between 2016 and 2020 when he worked with a Met unit operating undercover in bars and clubs to protect women from … sexual predators.
The second woman had come forward shortly after the first complainant and six months before the discipline hearing.
She alleged that over three years the officer had used a false identity to deceive her into casual sex while he was working ‘undercover’ in one of London’s trendiest clubbing districts.
The IOPC referred her disturbing complaint to the same anti-corruption squad already investigating the creepy officer.
These new allegations suggested there was a “pattern of behaviour” and potentially more victims.
However, the two cases and complainants were kept apart and the civilian members of the panel misled.
The reek of cover up and reputation management pervades both cases, despite claims by police chiefs of zero tolerance towards predators in uniform.
The creep is still undercover, but not as a policeman. Until now.
His name is Ian Steel.