Police officer squeezed woman's breast after drinking 16 pints of lager during work day trip

Constable guilty of gross misconduct after touching woman while ‘three-quarters of the way to absolutely wasted’

Ralph Bainbridge was an acting sergeant for Cleveland Police, headquartered in Hartlepool (Google)

A police officer who squeezed a woman’s breast after drinking 16 pints of beer during a day trip with colleagues has been found guilty of gross misconduct.

Constable Ralph Bainbridge, 41, from Hartlepool, had claimed at a disciplinary hearing he was trying to hug the victim from behind and accidentally touched her breast during a pub crawl in York.

But the panel rejected this explanation and said his “deliberate touching” of the woman was “a serious falling short of standards the public expects of a police officer”.

During the three-day hearing, the Cleveland Police officer admitted he had been “three-quarters of the way to absolutely wasted” on the day of the offence in October.

The panel heard that the woman said to Bainbridge after he groped her: “Get off, you are lucky I haven’t punched you in the f***ing throat.”

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the hearing the officer touched her deliberately.

Susan Monaghan, the legally-qualified panel chair, told Bainbridge: “The deliberate touching of [the woman] was a serious falling short of standards the public expects of a police officer.

“It amounts to gross misconduct.”

When he was challenged on the night about what happened, the panel found that Bainbridge was “defensive rather than contrite”.

He told the hearing at the Grand Hotel in Hartlepool that he had felt embarrassed.

Bainbridge was an acting sergeant at the time and has been an officer for more than 10 years.

The officer left the hearing before a final decision was taken on whether he should be dismissed.

Additional reporting by Press Association