Police need to ‘close the gaps’ that let officers commit crimes without forces finding out, chief says

‘I could be arrested and nobody but me would know I am the police,’ chief constable warns

Police need to “close the gaps” that leave officers able to commit crimes without their forces finding out, a senior officer has said.

British Transport Police (BTP) chief constable Lucy D'Orsi warned that without change, current systems can let predators like serial rapist David Carrick “fall through the cracks and go on to do harm”.

“If I was to commit a crime, get arrested and give my details, there is no obvious system check that would flag that I’m a police officer if I didn’t choose to tell them,” she wrote on her force’s website. “In my view this is a priority issue for our attention.”