Paul Street, fCambridgeshire Constabulary: Former Police officer guilty of misconduct after fostering ‘toxic’ culture among colleagues on WhatsApp group

A former police sergeant has been found guilty of misconduct in public office after encouraging a “toxic” WhatsApp culture that upset a dozen colleagues.

Paul Street, 41, encouraged his team to bully a detained teenager and asked a colleague to send him a sex video of a female suspect, the Old Bailey hearing heard.

The offenses were committed while he was working for Cambridgeshire Constabulary, leading a team at Cambourne Police Station dealing mainly with drug supply and organized crime within the county borders.

After nearly four hours of deliberations, a jury at the Old Bailey convicted Street, of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, on two counts of misconduct in a public office.

However, he was cleared of allegations that he assaulted a drug dealer during an arrest, causing actual bodily harm, and then perverting the course of justice.

The defendant held his head in his hands as Judge Mark Lucraft KC remanded him into custody for sentencing on July 30.

Judge Lucraft observed that the public would be “shocked” when they learned the full extent of Street’s actions.

Street had previously confessed to two crimes regarding the illegal disclosure of personal data regarding the information and screenshots he sent to his partner in 2020.

Jurors heard a further 12 police officers were investigated for behavior stemming from the “toxic” culture Street created.

Pc Josh Williams, 38, of Huntingdon, pleaded guilty to misconduct in public office.

Of the other 11 people under investigation, two resigned, one was dismissed for gross misconduct, one received a final warning, two received written warnings and the other five were dealt with for low-level performance issues.

Prosecutor Anne Whyte KC said Street had “created a culture of boastfulness and intolerance towards suspects” and a “zero tolerance attitude towards anyone in his team who disagreed with his methods and sentiments”.

He said: “Not only was it encouraging inappropriate attitudes, it was creating a toxic culture that junior officers would find difficult to challenge and likely to embrace.”

With his “rugged” style, he achieved “impressive results” in fighting serious crimes and found fame in television crime programs.

In 2017 he appeared in the BBC program Britain’s Teenage Drug Runners and in 2019 he appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Famous And Fighting Crime.

But anti-corruption officers uncovered Street’s two WhatsApp groups in 2021 after a new police officer reported him.

The court heard the investigations focused on two WhatsApp groups created by Street, one for 17 of his colleagues and the other for his “inner circle”.

In April 2020, Street called on his team to “bully” 17-year-old detainee Robiul Islam, encouraging them to “please hit him” and “rip his head off”.

In the fall of 2020, Williams was assigned to examine the phone of a female suspect, who he told Street was “pretty fit.”

Street asked him if there was “any nudity” and Williams said there was a video of the woman performing a sexual act.

Williams sent Street a photo from the woman’s phone showing her in her underwear.

The following year, Street asked on WhatsApp if Williams still had the intimate private video because he wanted to show it to the “kids in football”.

When interviewed about this, Street claimed that the woman, who was released without charge, wanted to see the footage to make sure she was not the victim of abusive behavior.

But Ms Whyte told jurors it was not Williams’s job to discuss or share private images, nor was it Street’s job to ask for nude photos or sex videos.

Jurors heard Street’s WhatsApp chat set the tone for petty officers to follow, regularly making references to bullying suspects.

Giving evidence, Street accepted his WhatsApp messages were “bad” but said the language used was “gallows humour”.

He told jurors: “This was part of the culture at the time. I’m not the only one responsible for this.”

“I used to say that they were malicious messages and that I shouldn’t have sent them. I was successful in my job and it made me arrogant.”

Ms Whyte suggested Street was more than a “maverick” police officer with unorthodox methods and that having good arrest rates did not justify his “out of control” behaviour.

He told jurors: “He repeatedly broke the rules and in doing so not only undermined public trust in the police, but also chose to ignore the fact that he behaved like the very criminals he loved to despise.”