A Met police detective who kept his job after telling a victim she was “amazingly hot” made inappropriate comments about female colleagues, saying he “would do anything for an attractive officer”, a court has heard.
The further allegations against DCI James Mason have emerged after Kristina O’Connor brought a legal challenge to the decision not to dismiss him for sending her inappropriate messages after he responded to her report of an attempted robbery.
O’Connor, a musician, said Mason turned the conversation to her love life and asked her out for dinner when he interviewed her after a group of men tried to steal her phone in 2011, leaving her “fearful of having to call or depend upon the police”.
She said it took many years to work up the “strength and courage” to report Mason, and the decision of a police misconduct panel in 2021 that he was guilty of gross misconduct but should keep his job made a mockery of the disciplinary process.
One of her arguments is that the Met commissioner failed to investigate her complaint properly before the panel’s hearing. In written arguments, submitted for Friday’s hearing at the high court in central London, her lawyers, Fiona Murphy KC and Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, said the allegations by one of Mason’s fellow officers showed that a “grossly misleading evidential picture was presented to the panel by the commissioner and that this failing caused the panel to reach an unreasonable outcome decision”.
Ch Insp Jones, who worked under Mason’s command in the robbery squad in Kentish Town in 2010, when he was a detective sergeant, claimed Mason “made inappropriate comments frequently” and was “overly interested in what he deemed to be attractive female PCs and didn’t hide this interest”. She added that on one occasion he was “scanning the office like a wolf” and making comments like “Who is that? She is fit” and “I am going to get her”.
Jones made the allegations, which she said “substantiated the claims already made [by O’Connor]” in February 2022 but they were revealed to the court only on 2 October, after Jones contacted O’Connor directly last month.
Jones’s allegations were made after Mason’s police disciplinary hearing had reached its conclusions, leading the commissioner to say that they had “no material impact” on the misconduct proceedings. But Murphy and Gallagher said they illustrated that, when investigating their client’s complaint against Mason, the commissioner, under the law, should have “made inquiry of women officers serving with Mr Mason so as to establish whether his conduct formed part of a pattern of behaviour”.
They said the commissioner’s failures to make those inquiries meant he “presented the panel with a grossly misleading picture of Mr Mason’s conduct and provided a bundle of glowing references from senior police officers”, indicating that “Mason’s conduct towards Ms O’Connor was a one-off aberration in an otherwise exemplary service history”.
The judicial review brought by O’Connor, the daughter of the comedian Des O’Connor, along with the support of the Good Law Project, against the panel’s decision not to dismiss Mason was heard in May and is awaiting judgment. But her lawyers said that, if they had known about the allegations made by Jones they would have “presented her case differently” and as such, they should be taken into account by Mr Justice Swift in reaching his judgment.
Anne Studd KC, representing the Met commissioner, said he “apologises profusely” for the late disclosure to the court of the allegations made by Jones and that the information “fell through the net”.
But she added: “The conclusion in this case should not change because of this late disclosure.”
Swift said he had already prepared his draft judgment but he would consider whether the details of Jones’s allegations changed anything.
