A police officer who wrote erotic fiction on his work laptop because he “did not have enough to do” has been dismissed from the force.
Detective Constable Thomas Sewell spent work hours drafting first-person stories containing “misogynistic, aggressive and sexual language,” a Metropolitan Police misconduct hearing was told.
The chair of the panel described the materials as “deeply offensive”.
Sewell admitted the allegation, saying he had written similar stories for years as a way of coping with a traumatic incident early in his career.
He also acknowledged using Wikipedia at work to view pages featuring erotic themes and explicit images, including “sex shows,” “pornography” and “exhibitionism”.
An extract from one of his stories, titled White Male Juvenile, was read to the hearing, in which he wrote: “If you’re simply going to do what women claim they hate doing and objectify yourself, show off your assets, your physicality, advertise your attributes like there’s a f****** sale on for them at the moment.”
In another passage, the story’s narrator describes a person in a mental health crisis who is considering suicide as “pond scum”.
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Sewell, who was working as a tutor training newly recruited detectives at the time, said he had been seriously injured in a pub earlier in his career and had “turned to writing” as a way of coping with the trauma.
“DC Sewell is very sorry and disappointed,” the hearing was told.
“His team did not have enough work to do because there are fewer detectives recruited than previously and, as a trainer, this left him with significant downtime,” an officer told the hearing.
Commander Katie Lilburn, chair of the misconduct hearing, said the content was “deeply offensive in that it is misogynistic as well as erotically explicit”.
“The misogynistic and sexualised comments in the documents are especially abhorrent because they were not just erotic but also specific to policing, and misogynistic in a policing context,” she added.
