A woman who described her terror at being harassed on a motorway by a man posing as a police officer has been told there can be no criminal investigation because forces failed to act in time.
The woman said she was driving on her own on the M1 in March 2023 when a “really angry” man in an unmarked car began shouting at her to pull over, showing what looked like a police ID, the BBC reported.
The man turned out to be a former contractor for Northamptonshire police and there was no record of him having returned his official ID.
In an interview with the BBC, the woman said he was “a fake policeman who wanted to do me harm” and that she felt “really let down” by the police.
The woman said she was speeding at about 80mph and thought he was a police officer but did not stop because she was scared.
“I immediately thought of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick,” she said. “I was genuinely frightened. I was shaking. I was gripping the steering wheel.”
Couzens raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021 after he used his warrant card to falsely arrest her.
Two police forces have apologised to the driver for their handling of her case, which resulted in no in-person interview with the accused and time running out before any charging decision could be made. The man denied the allegations.
She said the man crossed in front of her and went ahead in the outside lane, waving a small black wallet out of the window bearing a card with what looked like a royal crest, before slowing down and driving next to her.
“He leaned over holding the steering wheel with one hand. He was driving alongside me all the time, shouting to pull over. He was really angry. I felt really stressed,” she said.
“He’s looking at me, not the road ahead, and the window wasn’t open on my side but it was on his passenger side and he’s waving the badge that I can clearly see is a black wallet with a police crest badge stuck on the outside.”
The woman said she reported the incident and the number plate to the police after she stopped, by which point she was in the Derbyshire force area.
The BBC reports that she was told he was a Northamptonshire police officer, meaning it was initially dealt with by that force as a complaint against a police officer, rather than a crime.
Northamptonshire later discovered that the man was not an officer but instead a civilian contractor who had left the role months before she reported him. The force said it had no record of the man returning his ID badge when he stopped working for the contractor.
It carried a police crest, though it would have been stamped “not a warrant card” and would not have been issued in a wallet. The force said practices for returning cards had now been tightened up.
By the time Northamptonshire passed the case to Leicestershire to deal with it as a crime report nearly four months after the alleged incident, CCTV footage had gone. It was late August before Leicestershire logged it as an alleged crime of impersonating a police officer.
There is a six-month limit to prosecute the offence, and Leicestershire police said they ran out of time and did not speak to him. They apologised to the woman and said in a statement: “Leicestershire police takes any report of impersonation of a police officer extremely seriously. However, on this occasion our response did fall below the expected standard.”
In a letter to the woman in February, the professional standards department of Northamptonshire police apologised and said: “Ultimately you have been given a poor service throughout the life of this investigation. You were left feeling distressed following a male’s actions and this should have been investigated as a crime from the outset.
“Unfortunately, early misinformation that this male was a police officer with Northamptonshire police led to this becoming a complaint investigation as opposed to a criminal investigation.”
The BBC reported that the force promised to speak to the man and made a pre-arranged phone call a month later, when he denied the allegations.
