A black woman who was strip-searched by two Metropolitan Police officers after being wrongly suspected of carrying cannabis when she was a schoolgirl said she does not know if she is “going to feel normal again”
00:00A ruling last Thursday by a disciplinary panel found the actions of P.C. Christina Lynch and P.C. Rafael Chemieski, who have now both been dismissed without notice, amounted to gross misconduct after that strip search of a 15-year-old girl in Hackney in December of 2020.
00:23A number of key issues were highlighted. The panel heard how authorisation was not sought for the intimate search, which left child Q feeling demeaned and physically violated.
00:40An appropriate adult was not present, a key safeguard of a child's right. And the girl's mother was not told of the situation.
00:51And this incident has been a long-running controversy hanging over the Metropolitan Police.
00:57And I'm pleased to say that in two out of three of those searches of this nature, a criminal item of some description or a crime has been revealed, which means that in two out of three instances at least, these searches are making the public safer.
01:15I think it is something that every officer will need to weigh up in terms of the proportionality of what it is that they're trying to achieve whenever they affect any stop and search.
01:26So ultimately, we need to check ourselves off in terms of what is it that we're trying to prevent and what power do we have to utilise in order to actually make sure that we protect the public without overusing our powers.
01:38And I think that's why we're wrong in this occasion, is that whilst the officers may have had an honest and clear belief around the potential grounds of what they're doing, ultimately, the use of the stop and search power in this instance was an overuse and was disproportionate and should never have happened.
01:53And I think all the incidents you've mentioned in this latest incident, of course, are always a setback in terms of community confidence.
02:01We as a police service exist for the public to protect the public.
02:04And ultimately, we want to make sure that we maintain the hearts and minds of our public as we do so.
02:08So it's always a sad day when we see something like this where findings of gross misconduct against our officers damage public confidence in what we're doing.
02:15But I do believe that we can and will continue to build that confidence because we always learn from mistakes that we make and we do do everything we can to make sure that we improve our service to the public.
