A Metropolitan Police officer has been dismissed for gross misconduct after faking a witness's signature on an official statement. The officer, identified only as 'Officer A' and with four years of service, was sacked on 24 June for breaching honesty standards and undermining police investigations through a “failure to complete basic tasks”.
Incident Details
The incident occurred on 17 March 2024, during a response to a reported domestic disturbance. The misconduct panel heard that Officer A used her own signature, attributing it to a witness named 'AP', after failing to obtain the signature directly from the woman. At least two colleagues at Islington Police Station reported seeing a blank signature box on the paperwork. The Met's record-keeping software mandates a completed signature for any witness statement to be submitted.
One police officer said they heard Officer A say at the station that she had “lost” a signature, only to later “cheerfully” say she had fixed it, adding: “I remember what the signature looked like.”
Witness Denial and Officer's Defence
When officers visited AP on June 14, 2024, she denied having ever signed her witness statement. Officer A continued to deny signing it in AP’s name. However, in a later statement she claimed that if she had done so, it “could only have been” if she and AP had thought it was signed but a technical glitch had caused the electronic statement “not to be actually signed”. She added that if this were the case, it was thought to be better to rectify this by adding a signature instead of “further troubling a vulnerable witness by going back to them”. Officer A later distanced herself from these words, saying that her lawyers had pressured her to make this statement.
Panel's Findings
The misconduct hearings took place at Palestra House in Southwark between April 2025 and June 2026. The panel was unconvinced, and found she had acted dishonestly and in a way that was “fundamentally” incompatible with the behaviour of a serving police officer. “She would instinctively know that it would be wrong to sign a witness statement in the name of another person,” the panel’s report said.
Second Dishonesty Incident
This was the second incident in which Officer A was called out for her dishonesty. A few days before the signature incident, a man came to the police station to report a death threat. In response, the officer’s Sergeant said Officer A had to carry out intelligence checks on two men before escalating it to the Inspector. But she went straight to the Inspector without doing so, and when asked by him she said she had performed the checks. When questioned again later, Officer A said she was “99.9 per cent certain” she had.
The misconduct panel also criticised the officer for shredding her own notes of the alleged crime – despite her knowing the police database was unreliable. This left the team without an audit trail.
Conclusion
The investigation concluded that Officer A knew she had not done the checks that day “at all”, and that she was dishonest and lacked integrity in claiming she had. The Met dismissed her without notice after the misconduct hearing concluded on 3 June.
