Female police officer, 40, filmed herself performing sex act while on duty in her station and sent video to her partner, misconduct panel hears

• Former PC Clare Ogden, 40, filmed herself pleasuring herself while on duty
• The footage came to light after her mobile phone was seized by police bosses
• Ms Ogden said ‘Don’t think I have experienced embarrassment and shame like it’

A former police officer has been carpeted for recording a raunchy video of herself in the station for her partner.

Former PC Clare Ogden, 40, filmed herself pleasuring herself while on duty and wearing her police uniform, a misconduct panel heard.

The footage came to light after her mobile phone was seized by bosses who suspected she had been accessing confidential data from the police computer and sharing it with a colleague as a joke.

A misconduct hearing was told three personal videos were discovered on the device but the ex-officer only accepted that one was sexual.

When confronted her excuse was that she was probably on her lunch break and the footage had been shared with her partner during one of the Covid lockdowns.

She told the panel: ‘I went downstairs in the office to use the bathroom. It was an ill-judged spur of the moment decision, I was caught in the moment.

Former Cleveland Police officer Clare Ogden attends a police disciplinary hearing at Middlesbrough’s Riverside Stadium this morning

The footage came to light after Ms Ogden’s mobile phone was seized by her police bosses

‘I don’t think I have experienced embarrassment and shame like it. I just wish I had not done it. It was a five to seven second moment of my life that I will regret for the rest of it.

‘I have a good sense of humour but I may have been having a bad day or was in a bad place mentally and at that moment I thought those things were funny. On reflection it is not funny.

‘It has been my experience through this investigation that you can’t trust the people who are investigating you, no matter what they say they do the opposite.

‘I felt somewhat pressurised to resign in June this year, it was not something I wanted to do and not something I took lightly.’   

Earlier barrister Mark Ley-Morgan, opening the case on behalf of Cleveland Police, said former Pc Ogden shot the videos after clocking on for her shift at Redcar Police Station.

He said: ‘There are three videos. One is accepted of being of her performing a sex act upon herself. There are two others she is saying are not sexual.

‘She accepts on her part that globally this allegation amounts to gross misconduct and one of the images is definitely sexualised.

‘She says ‘I’m not accepting I was on duty. I might have been on my lunch break’. In my submission, that is wrong.

Barrister Mark Ley-Morgan, opening the case on behalf of Cleveland Police, said former Pc Ogden shot the videos after clocking on for her shift at Redcar Police Station.

‘When officers come on duty they are on duty for the entirety of the shift. They are not working at Sainsbury’s where they get an hour off for lunch.

‘They are there for the entirety of their shift and they are paid for the entire shift.

‘She is in uniform. She is in a police station. Any member of the public is going to take a dim view of a police officer who engages in that sort of sexual behaviour and recording it while on duty in a police station.’

The panel was told the incident happened during the Covid pandemic and she only sent the video to her partner.

Mr Ley-Morgan added: ‘Irrelevant. It would not be the first time in police disciplinaries that a relationship has broken down and material exchanged when everything was fine that, when the relationship has broken down, has been disseminated to others.

‘That this was during the time of Covid in no way reduces the seriousness of it.’

Former Pc Ogden resigned in June 2022 after being investigated over the allegations that she recorded images of sensitive police data on her personal mobile and sent them to someone else, and engaged in sexualised behaviour at Redcar Police Station.

Mr Ley-Morgan said whenever an officer accessed the computer a warning popped on screen not to look at or record anything unless it was for a proper policing purpose and not to share it with anyone else, including fellow officers.

Checks on former Pc Ogden’s personal mobile revealed 72 images of computer screens, evidence bags and crime scenes.

She told her bosses she had recorded these on her personal device because the battery on her work phone was flat.

But she also admitted she had shared a number of shots of the police computer screen with a colleague as a joke.

Data protection officers later assessed 34 of the images were in the most serious red category meaning the individuals involved, including a registered sex offender, were easily identifiable and could be seriously harmed if the images fell into the wrong hands, such as vigilante groups.

The ex-cop was interviewed about ten specimen pictures and in half the cases she said she had shared the images because ‘she thought they were funny’.

One was two images of a registered sex offender, one a normal face shot and the other of them wearing an ‘obvious wig’ which she thought ‘was a tiny bit funny’.

She also shared an image of Moonpig card containing a vengeful rhyme sent from a jilted partner to their ex’s new partner which she found ‘hilarious’, the panel heard.

Other images related to incidents in which someone had called her ‘a d**k’ at work and her amusement at being mistaken for a male officer during a call out.

Sensitive data also appeared in images she shared about her busy work schedule, and details of s suspects in robbery, kidnap and sex cases.

The former Pc said she had shared the images by WhatsApp, which was encrypted, but that did not stop the recipient sharing them with anyone else.

She insisted the images ‘never went outside the police family’, adding: ‘I am not telling you who the person was because it’s a police officer. It’s a police officer I want to protect.’

But Mr Ley-Morgan said the only reason she needed to protect another officer was that the colleague was duty-bound to report her for what she had done.

Source: Read Full Article