An off-duty Metropolitan police officer threatened nightclub bouncers with a picture of a gun after he had been binge drinking.
Former PC Samuel Addy, who has now resigned, was trying to get into a London Bridge club on March 6, last year, when he made the inadvertent threat.
While showing the security staff the picture, Mr Addy said: “Look back in the day you wouldn’t mess with me.”
A Metropolitan Police panel has now concluded that this was not a “split-second mistake”, the incident took place over eight minutes, in which Mr Addy behaved in a way that discredits the police service, a panel has now concluded.
Mr Addy also “made physical contact” with another officer while repeatedly refusing to “step back” when asked to.
On multiple occasions, PC Addy insulted the officers, asking them: “How hard is it for you to understand?”
At one point Mr Addy told the officer: “Don’t f***ing touch me – because I will lay you out.”
The panel concluded: “He was given a number of opportunities to simply step backwards which, as a police officer himself, he ought to have recognised was an appropriate action to take to keep both himself and (the other officer) safe.
“Instead, he made a direct threat to the officer doing so using a swear word to emphasise his point.”
Mr Addy was found to have breached the peace, had physical contact with an emergency worker and caused alarm and distress to door staff.
Together, these amounted to gross misconduct in the panel’s view, because former PC Addy’s behaviour “discredited the police service and undermined public confidence in it”.
Mr Addy tried to argue that he had been “binge drinking” because he used it as a “coping mechanism” but the panel found no evidence this issue constituted a disability that would be relevant to its findings.
The panel said in its conclusion: “Former PC Addy was wholly culpable for his actions in relation to his interactions with the doormen, the members of the public and the police officers.
“No one asked him to behave in the way he did, nor was there any justifiable provocation the panel concluded for his acting as the panel have described above.
“The panel do not consider that former PC Addy was simply being an ‘irritant’ instead he threatened violence towards a member of the public and to (the other police officer).
“It is through good fortune, rather than anything former PC Addy said or did, that matters did not escalate further and a full-on fight occurred.
“The fact that former PC Addy was voluntarily intoxicated, is not a defence or excuse for his actions.”
It said that if Mr Addy had not resigned from his post, he would have been dismissed.
