Officer dismissed for lying about police car crash in Eton Wick

A police constable has been dismissed for gross misconduct after crashing a police vehicle into a parked car in Eton Wick – then lying about the cause.

The collision was severe enough to flip the police car onto its roof.

PC Charlotte Morris, the driver, claimed that she had to swerve to avoid hitting an animal that had run into the road, but Thames Valley Police (TVP) did not believe this.

The force believed that she had instead lost focus while driving. PC Morris stuck to her guns for over a year, excepting one formal interview by the force.

Ultimately, a police conduct panel opted to dismiss PC Morris, for ‘a breach of the professional standard of honesty and integrity’.

Her dismissal came after staunch disagreement between experts over the cause of the crash, using data taken from the police car itself.

The incident

In the early hours of August 27, 2023, PC Morris was driving a police vehicle with a junior colleague as a passenger.

They were returning to complete some paperwork following the arrest of a suspect.

While driving, PC Morris crashed into a parked BMW on Eton Wick Road in Windsor.

This caused the police vehicle to spin across the road and flip onto its roof, coming to rest on a grass verge on the opposite side of the carriageway.

Fortunately, neither officer suffered any lasting injury, though PC Morris received minor head injuries and a back injury and was taken to Wexham Park Hospital.

The collision caused some relatively minor damage to the rear and side of the parked BMW.

PC Morris gave an immediate account via her police radio that she had swerved to avoid an animal that had crawled out into the road.

On 14 October, PC Morris gave a formal police interview (known as a PACE interview). In it, she said she did not remember an animal running into the road during the incident.

PC Morris was shown CCTV of the incident and it was put to her that her crash was more consistent with her simply drifting into the parked vehicle.

Police case versus PC Morris account

TVP claimed that PC Morris told a deliberate lie about swerving to avoid an animal, to minimise her culpability for the crash.

They said this was ‘plainly dishonest’, especially as she repeated this claim for more than a year.

By contrast, PC Morris maintained that this was her honest account, and what she said in the PACE interview did not reflect this, because of her anxiety and underconfidence.

She felt she ‘could not get the right words out, especially [because] it had already been implied by the interviewing officer that her account was incapable of belief.’

The panel acknowledged that PC Morris gave five materially consistent accounts of the incident, with the one exception being the PACE interview.

TVP’s case relied on expert interpretation of the data from the telematics device fitted to the police vehicle. This collects data, including its speed and direction of movement.

But the two different experts representing TVP and PC Morris ‘expressed contradictory opinions’ on a number of issues.

Car evidence

Dr Ford, for TVP, said the telematics data showed no sudden left-hand turning, as would be expected if PC Morris’ account was true.

By contrast, Mr Webb, representing PC Morris, felt the data did match other sources of information, including the car’s accelerometer, CCTV stills and damage to the parked BMW.

The panel agreed there was sufficient reason to question the reliability of the telematics data, and unlike Dr Ford, Mr Webb’s expertise extended to other aspects of accident reconstruction.

However, he ‘did not have nearly enough evidence to be able to conduct a proper reconstruction.’

“Thankfully the panel do not have to conduct a full reconstruction of the collision in order to answer the central question in this case,” the panel wrote, “namely, whether it is more likely than not that the officer lied in her account of an animal running into the road causing the collision.”

Ultimately, the panel felt there was ‘a lack of clear evidence of dramatic evasive action’ immediately prior to the crash, which would be expected if there had been an animal in the road.

Conclusion

Having concluded that PC Morris did lie, this is considered to amount to gross misconduct.

“Honesty and integrity are fundamental requirements for any police officer,” the panel wrote.

“Cases involving any form of dishonesty on duty will always be serious because of the importance of maintaining public trust and confidence in the police service.”

Moreover, the mitigating factor that PC Morris may have panicked in the moment ‘is reduced by her persisting with the same fiction thereafter.’

The panel wrote: “We regret that the least sanction we can impose … is dismissal.”