Police officer sacked after writing erotic stories on work laptop

A police officer who wrote erotic stories on his work laptop has been sacked.

A Metropolitan Police misconduct hearing was told that Detective Constable Thomas Sewell used work downtime to write a first-person story containing “misogynistic, aggressive and sexual language”, which the chair described as “deeply offensive”.

DC Sewell admitted the allegation, claiming he had penned such stories for many years to cope with a traumatic early career incident.

He also admitted going on Wikipedia during working hours, accessing pages containing erotic themes and explicit images, including “sex shows”, “pornography” and “exhibitionism”.

In an extract of a story – called White Male Juvenile – shared by the hearing, the officer wrote: “Why bother trying to succeed in the male-dominated world, 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 a different passage, the character in the story refers to a person in mental health crisis contemplating suicide as “pond scum”.

Dc Sewell was working as a tutor training newly recruited detectives at the time, and claimed to have not had enough work to do.

Defending his actions, he said he was seriously injured at a pub earlier in his career, and “turned to writing” as a way of dealing 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 on his behalf.

Chair of the misconduct hearing Commander Katie Lilburn ruled that his actions amounted to gross misconduct and dismissed him from the force without notice.

“The content is deeply offensive in that it is misogynistic as well as erotically explicit,” she said of his story.

“Dc Sewell admitted doing the writing during working hours so he cannot have been diligent in the exercise of his duties and responsibilities.

“The misogynistic and sexualised comments in the documents is especially abhorrent because they were not just erotic but also specific to policing and misogynistic in a policing context,” she added.