EXCLUSIVE: A spate of misconduct and court proceedings suggests the Met have a problem with officers forming sexual relationships with vulnerable women while on duty – MyLondon spoke to the woman who reported former Detective Constable Mark Connor
When Mary (not her real name) answered the door to a pair of police officers in 2017, the Met Police were not yet tarnished by a series of scandals around women’s safety. Sarah Everard was still alive, some of Britain’s most shocking sex offenders remained at large, and Baroness Louise Casey was yet to conclude the force is institutionally racist, misogynistic, and homophobic.
Despite this relatively shame-free period for Britain’s largest police force, Mary was already feeling resentful. She had reported being raped in 2015, and, in her view, the officers who dealt with her were disbelieving and failed to ask the right questions, leaving her case short of the evidence needed to bring charges.
Mary nervously greeted the officers with her usual warmth and offered to call them back if her neighbour, the suspect, came home. Mary had nearly lost her faith in policing completely, but that day, when the conversation moved to her own experiences, it finally felt like the officers were listening — especially the tall one, Mark.
Mary would later tell police watchdog investigators how Detective Constable Mark Connor entered the hallway, shut the front door, and sat her down on the stairs to listen to her story. For the first time since she reported being attacked in 2015, a police officer made her feel like he had her best interests at heart.
“He listened to me and he was behaving like a police officer,” Mary tells MyLondon, speaking almost a decade later at her home in East London. The kitchen is dark and oppressive. She barely pauses for breath as we speak.
During this first encounter, Mary says she offered up reliable intel about ‘grooming gang’ activity centred around a McDonald’s. Mary says Connor was surprised to hear her talk about the grooming case, but assured her undercover police were already on it.
Remembering what happened as Connor left, Mary says: “I thanked him and gave him a hug and kiss on the cheek, like when you say goodbye. At this point, he did not know my name or have any contact details or anything.”
A few hours later, Mary’s neighbour got home. She called 999 and he was arrested. It should have been the end of her involvement with Connor, but an email landed in her inbox the next morning that would lead to ‘filthy’ texts, unanswered questions over thousands of deleted messages, and a lie about how officers deal with covert human intelligence sources.
‘This guy is up to something’
“Morning [Mary], thank you for your help this morning. Cheers Mark Connor.” Mary shows me this email dated to July 26, 2017, claiming she still has no idea how Connor got hold of her email address. “You’re welcome,” she wrote back. Mary says she thought it was normal for officers to contact members of the public like this.
The conversation might have ended there, but using his work email Connor continued: “I come round and see you if you want. Need to say thank you for your help. To be honest with you, I can’t comment for what other officers have done. I am not a supervisor I am just a DC. If you are happy for me to pop round I be more than happy to speak to you.”
Mary responded ‘that would be good’ and provided her mobile number. “I was humouring him,” Mary claims, recalling a degree of caution about his motives, “I was thinking ‘This guy is up to something. He’s going to be in trouble. There’s going to be a complaint’.”
The pair communicated like this for around 20 days. It began with chatting about the weekend, but eventually the conversation shifted to Connor feeling cold during his night shift. When Mary was interviewed by the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC) about this in November 2021, she told them this was the moment Connor tried to ’direct the conversation flirty’.
For his part, Connor told the IOPC it ‘seemed to me that [Mary] was quite happy to maintain contact’ and claimed his purpose in doing so was to see if she wanted to provide intelligence on the local area. “I was thinking that she might be someone who was genuinely interested in becoming an informant, even a registered informant,” he wrote in his response to caution.
But this claim from Connor, that he was exploring the possibility Mary might become an informant, was blown apart by a statement from his supervisor, quoted from the IOPC’s investigation report seen by MyLondon.
“All activity relating to the use of informants in an investigation I have ever worked on, has been managed by a Dedicated Source Unit (DSU),” Connor’s supervisor said, “No one outside of the DSU should be tasking members of the public with obtaining intelligence on our behalf.”
‘Best looking officer in the Met’
In her interview with the IOPC, Mary said Connor started to call her about non-policing matters. On one occasion it is alleged Connor told her to get off the bus so he could pick her up in his car and take her shopping at B&Q. “It didn’t sit right with me, I was uneasy with it,” Mary later told investigators.
During this period, Connor also made another visit to her address, which he claimed was ‘to discuss gardening’. After this a series of ‘openly flirtatious’ emails followed, with both making innuendos. Connor denied having a ‘hidden agenda or underlying specific sexual intent’ when he was questioned about this by the police watchdog.
When the email conversation moved to WhatsApp it was more of the same, but Mary told the IOPC she was asked to delete 10,000 messages by Connor. Those messages contained more evidence of Connor asking personal questions; including about how she spent her time, what pubs she goes to, and the men she was speaking to, she claims.
In their investigation, the IOPC noted the absence of messages on Connor’s own personal device indicated he may have tried to cover up their communication. “It is possible that Connor deleted messages to conceal his contact with her, possibly suggesting he was aware of his duty,” the report said.
Despite denying he was ever looking to have any sort of sexually inappropriate relationship, surviving screenshots in the IOPC investigation report show Connor:
- Sent a photo of his face labelled ‘best looking officer in the Met’.
- Offered to ‘arrest’ Mary.
- Referenced Mary’s clitoris and asked ‘how many fingers’.
- Told Mary ‘I need a BJ’.
When these screenshots were put to him by IOPC investigators, Connor gave no comment. In his written response he explained they were ‘good natured’ interactions, and although ‘there can be a sexual innuendo and inference drawn from some of these exchanges, it was never my intention to establish or pursue an improper sexual or emotional relationship’.
When police watchdog investigators looked at four phones seized from Connor’s address, they were able to uncover sexual exchanges dated to December 2020. But Mary says these were just the tip of the iceberg.
“Out of all our conversations, only five did not end up with him taking a load of filth and asking me filthy questions,” she told MyLondon. The rest, Mary claims, were deleted, but investigators said they were unable to prove this.
Confronted with the surviving messages by investigators, Connor said they were ‘slightly flirtatious and rather saucy’ but insisted they were ‘in jest and good humour’. Asked about why the sexual references had continued after Mary shared that her cousin had died, Connor said they were designed to ‘cheer her up and get her away from thinking the sad things’. He also said he was sorry for ‘any distress or upset’, and described some of his responses as ‘ill-judged’.
After those final messages in December 2020, contact between the two ceased. Then in January 2021, Mary complained to the Met and her complaint was handed over to the IOPC in June that year. Connor resigned in November 2023. In its final report, the IOPC said the Met could find no evidence Connor used the police computer to gain information about Mary.
‘I refuse to be alone with a male police officer’
In April last year, a study titled ‘London, you have a problem with women’, published by the journal of Policing and Society, concluded in terms of reputation. The writers surveyed nine English regions and found 66 per cent of women in London do not fully trust Britain’s largest police force. Mary is one of them.
“I can tell you now, I do not trust police officers,” Mary says, “Especially male police officers. I will never trust a police officer again. I do not trust a single thing they say, unless I have seen evidence. I refuse to be alone with a male police officer.”
This year a police misconduct panel ruled former Detective Chief Inspector James Mason should have been sacked for asking Des O’Connor’s daughter Kristina to go on a date after she reported being robbed. The original decision not to fire him was only reversed after Ms O’Connor, aged 24 when Mason called her ‘amazingly hot’, brought a legal challenge against the ruling.
Another disturbing case involved former PC James Gage, who embarked on a sexual relationship with a mentally ill woman when she reported being a victim of a cyber attack at at police station in West London. The woman made and then withdrew an report of rape against PC Gage, something he denied and was never charged with, a tribunal heard.
In July, MyLondon reported on the trial of 38-year-old former PC Daniel Humphreys, a Met Police response driver who had a sexual relationship with a domestic violence victim, whose boyfriend he should have been investigating for assault. During the relationship, Humphreys boasted about recruiting another woman as a special constable, having also met her as a victim on the job.
Other serious cases include former Sergeant Jonathan Peters, recently jailed for eight months over a sexual relationship with a woman he met on duty, and former PC Philip Hunter, described as a ‘sexual predator who used his position to take advantage of vulnerable women’. Hunter was found guilty of gross misconduct after trying to start a relationship with a woman he met on a welfare visit.
‘We are reforming our professionalism’
After a misconduct panel’s decision to bar Connor from policing – the hearing took place after Connor had resigned – the IOPC published the result of their probe into the former detective in July last year. Despite his insistent denials, the panel concluded Connor, now aged 49, ‘did attempt to pursue an inappropriate sexual or emotional relationship with the woman’ and visited her house ‘without a policing purpose’.
“Connor was an experienced police officer who chose to pursue an inappropriate relationship with a woman he met during his duties,” said IOPC London director Charmaine Arbouin, adding: “His actions, including sending sexually explicit messages from his work phone, are not fitting of a police officer.”
Reacting to Mary’s story, Andrea Simon, Director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) told MyLondon: “For far too long, there has been a culture of impunity within policing. Repeated reports of misconduct have severely undermined public trust and confidence in policing, and while the growing number of investigations into misconduct shows action is being taken – the reality is that women and girls continue to be failed by a system that does not always take them seriously or hold perpetrators to account.
“Unchecked police powers and a deep-rooted culture of misogyny and racism have long enabled officers to commit violence against women and girls. Police officers should be held to the highest standards of conduct and be held accountable whenever they misuse their power to abuse, manipulate and coerce women.”
In response to our story, a Met Police spokesperson said: “As part of A New Met for London action plan, we are delivering a culture change and fixing our foundations, as well as increasing our focus on tackling violence against women and girls.
“We are reforming our professionalism and targeting action within the Met, including tackling sexual offenders in order to bring justice to victims. We are committed to showing we are maintaining the high standards the public expects, and will continue to work hard to keep Londoners safe.”
Former DC Mark Connor was approached for comment.
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