Two police officers have spoken of their “enormous regret” at failing to report a colleague accused of supplying drugs sooner. PC Lauren Rickwood and PC Ben Whitby told an Avon & Somerset police misconduct hearing that they were wrong to wait weeks before raising the alarm about Weston-super-Mare plain-clothes officer PC Jonathan Biggins.
Both were on separate secondments to his unit, which tackled drugs in the town, in 2020 when they say the officer seized and then gave back Class A substances to users who he had stopped-and-searched in the street in exchange for information about their dealers. PC Biggins, who has since resigned from the force, is accused of breaching the standards of professional behaviour for police officers, amounting to gross misconduct. He denies the allegations.
PC Rickwood, who had been an officer less than a year, was on her first patrol with the team in May 2020 when they stopped a known drug user in Baker Street. She told the panel on day two of the hearing at constabulary headquarters in Portishead on Wednesday, May 17, that although she did not see the drugs directly, PC Biggins asked where he had got them from and the man described three men who sold him Class A drugs near the ferris wheel minutes earlier and showed a text message from them.
