How British police fitted me up for a vile sex crime they KNEW I hadn’t done, says Met’s gun girl who’s suing over ‘malicious leaks’

When Carol Howard, the former poster girl for the Metropolitan Police, took her employers to an employment tribunal, the verdict was huge embarrassment to the pre-eminent force in the land.

The Met was found to have subjected her to an orchestrated campaign of ‘malicious, vindictive and spiteful actions’, which effectively derailed a glittering 13-year career.

Just how malicious and vindictive, however, she has only now revealed. Because, in a new legal action, 35-year-old Miss Howard says her employers not only discriminated against her, but accused her of crimes – including possession of an indecent image of a child – she had not committed to silence and discredit her.

More shocking still, details of the ‘crimes’ were passed to the media and even to the employment tribunal in an apparent smear campaign, despite the fact that, in at least two cases, the allegations against her had already been quietly dropped.

‘I’m in no doubt at all that these arrests and so-called allegations were a crude attempt to silence me,’ says Carol, a firearms officer attached to the elite Diplomatic Protection Squad, whose image was seen all over London as the face of the Met at the 2012 London Olympics.

‘I have had my reputation besmirched. My personal life was turned inside out, my daughter kept from me and fingers pointed at me as though I was some kind of sexual deviant and unable to do my job properly.

‘I was effectively being punished for daring to think I was as good as the white men I worked with and for speaking up for myself.’

She says she has issued legal proceedings in an attempt to force the Met – which still employs her – to own up to its actions.

Carol was arrested on three occasions between August last year and April 2014, leading to a total of eight investigations against her for ‘crimes’ including criminal damage, harassment and perverting the course of justice.

In fresh employment tribunal papers, seen by The Mail on Sunday, Ms Howard also accuses the Met of maliciously informing Sussex Social Services about an ‘indecent image’ to spark a child protection investigation that prevented Ms Howard from seeing her six-year-old daughter for four weeks. The information was passed on despite the fact Sussex Police had already decided it was not necessary to refer the matter to social services.

In one particularly humiliating instance, five uniformed Met officers arrived at her daughter’s school and marched her away.

She is particularly angry that investigations following her arrest on April 22, 2014 were dropped within a matter of weeks, yet she was not informed and was kept on suspension and police bail until the end of July 2014 when the Met finally told her they would be taking no further police action against her.

Worse still, the Met told both the media and the Tribunal judge about Ms Howard still being on police bail as a result of this arrest as late as July – based on investigations that had already been abandoned. She spent a full 13 months on bail with the threat of legal action that never materialised.

Ms Howard has already spoken about the way she was victimised within the Met’s firearms squad, in particular by her Acting Inspector who had attempted to ‘undermine, discredit and belittle’ her.

But the breakdown of Carol’s ten-year relationship with the father of her youngest daughter made matters worse. She and her husband separated in 2012.

‘In August last year, not long after our separation, we had a dispute. He was upset and under so much stress he stupidly went to Crawley police station and falsely claimed that I had assaulted him 14 months previously and harassed him,’ she says.

She is still astonished, however, at how quickly things spiralled out of control after that.

‘Even if I had scratched him, which I didn’t, it would only have been a minor offence of common assault, but the Police deliberately ramped it up to the more serious allegation of actual bodily harm to justify an arrest.’

Although Rob called the station seven times without my knowledge to withdraw his allegations, he stated he was being fobbed off. Then on the day prior to my arrest, he went to the station in person to make a withdrawal statement and he was told to ‘go away and to come back later at 6:30pm’ and the same officers attended my home and arrested me at 6:00pm – 30 minutes before he was due to return to the police station. It was a set-up.’

Carol says she was held for four hours in a police cell before being interrogated ‘like a common criminal’. And, although this was Sussex police’s jurisdiction, she was confronted on arrival at the police station by a Met police inspector who had been involved in her tribunal complaints and was later found to have acted unlawfully against her. Carol believed this further supports her claims of both forces working together to close ranks against her.

‘I felt the officers in attendance were enjoying the fact that I was frightened and upset.

They didn’t bother to tell me or my solicitor that Rob had withdrawn his statement. Given my clean record they could simply have invited me in for an interview under caution, but it was all done with malice and clearly pre-planned. The Met wanted to have the arrest over me, so they could use it at the forthcoming employment tribunal.’

But when her husband lodged a complaint over their treatment of Carol, he too was arrested by the same police officers for perverting the course of justice and wasting police time. Carol feels he was being punished for standing up for her.

To Carol’s astonishment, in January 2014 she, too, was further arrested for perverting the course of justice and witness intimidation (the police claimed she had cajoled her husband into withdrawing his allegations against her.)

In May 2014, it is alleged that the Metropolitan Police contacted Sussex Social Services and asked them to carry out a child protection referral into an ‘indecent image’.

In her latest employment tribunal application Ms Howard says: ‘There was absolutely no basis on which the innocent picture of my own daughter could be said to be indecent. Even Sussex police had apparently accepted that there was no basis on which to inform child protection or social services about the matter. However, to victimise me and harass me further, the Met had maliciously referred me to Sussex social services and closely liaised with Sussex Police to do so.

‘I did not see my daughter for four weeks. It was awful and heartbreaking. I had to go to my daughter’s sports day and see parents look at me in disgust because they thought I was a paedophile,’ she recalls.

‘It is the worst thing you could say about any woman – especially a mother – and I was unable to defend myself, because of it. It is all connected with my complaints of discrimination against the Met. They appear to victimise officers who complain by arresting them.’

Last month an employment tribunal awarded her £37,000 in aggravated damages for sexual and racial discrimination. But she says it is no compensation for being falsely labelled a ‘child predator’ – or the destruction of her career.

Original report here

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