Ex-Met Officer filmed making rape jokes committed gross misconduct

A former Metropolitan Police officer who was secretly filmed joking about rape and sexual assault has been found to have committed gross misconduct by a tribunal panel.

Ex-police constable Brian Sharkey, who retired in May 2025, made a series of comments in undercover footage which aired in a BBC Panorama documentary in October belittling claims of racial bias and talking about disposing of evidence, his misconduct hearing in south London was told.

Finding his behaviour breached professional standards and amounted to gross misconduct, panel chairman Commander Stephen Clayman said of Mr Sharkey’s comment about sexual offences: “It undermines public confidence in policing at a time when police forces and particularly the Met Police are trying to demonstrate how seriously it takes offences of violence against women and girls.”

At a pub following a shift in January last year, Mr Sharkey’s colleagues were discussing a police officer getting away with committing sexual assault, the tribunal heard earlier.

Following on from that discussion, footage played on Friday showed Mr Sharkey saying: “If you are going to get accused of it you might as well f****** do it then.

“If you go down for a sexual assault you might as well go down for rape.”

He added: “Please, that’s a joke. I challenge myself on that.”

He then said: “That was wrong, I do apologise.”

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Cecily White, for the Met Police, told the tribunal it is “clear” he was making a joke, adding: “For an officer to make a joke about allegations of sexual assault or rape, especially to other colleagues… (it) is capable of undermining public trust and confidence because it is capable of making members of the public think that police officers do not think such allegations are particularly serious. They are just a joke, just a laughing matter.

“It is capable of giving the impression that they won’t be taken seriously.”

During his evidence, Mr Sharkey told the panel “something else had been said” after the discussion about sexual assault and that the conversation had turned towards challenge culture in the Met.

He claimed he meant to provide an “example” of how treating “trivial matters” with too much weight can devalue the impact of more serious matters, but accepted it was a “poor example” and “very, very, very wrong”.

“I take sexual assault very, very seriously, do not trivialise it at all,” he said.

“I do regret it, I regretted it right from the start.”

In August 2024, Mr Sharkey was filmed while taking his break during a night shift telling the undercover journalist: “You stop a toerag because he is up to no good, you don’t find anything on him ‘well you’re just stopping me because I’m black or you’re just stopping me because I’m this or you’re just stopping me because I’m that’ and you just get a whole load of a mouth full of shit from them.”

Ms White argued the then-officer was treating claims of racial bias as “spurious excuses”.

“The use of stop and search powers particularly against black and minority communities is a legitimate matter of public concern as this officer was or should have been aware,” the lawyer for the Met said.

Mr Sharkey told his misconduct hearing he “was not being racist at all” and that he would have given more examples rather than just said “this and that” but he got “very tongue-tied”.

He said he does believe the abuse of power over racial bias “is a source of concern”, adding: “I’m not trying to trivialise it at all it was not my intention.”

At the pub evening in January last year, Mr Sharkey was also videoed speaking to the undercover journalist about who to bring into custody.

He said: “If it’s some office worker who has got his first bit of class A – I don’t say do this because I may have, may not have done it – ‘oh shit mate I’ve dropped it, oh f*** I’ve got no evidence now’.”

Mr Sharkey added that if it was someone with a criminal record it would be a different set of rules.

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The former officer said he was not talking about himself but that he was telling a story from his probation days some 20 years ago, the panel heard.

“I had explained it incorrectly but that gave him the impression I had done it,” he said on Friday.

The panel found his comments amounted to a breach of the standards of professional behaviour in respect of authority, respect and courtesy, discreditable conduct and equality and diversity.

Mr Sharkey was also filmed making a sexual innuendo to colleagues but the panel did not find that the comment breached professional standards.

On October 1 last year Panorama aired footage that had been captured by an undercover BBC journalist working as a designated detention officer at Charing Cross police station custody suite.

Seven other police officers have been sacked after the BBC investigation.

Last year Pc Sean Park, Sergeant Lawrence Hume, Sergeant Clayton Robinson, Pc Jason Sinclair-Birt, Pc Philip Neilson, Pc Martin Borg and Sergeant Joe McIlvenny were dismissed without notice in separate hearings after it was found they had committed gross misconduct.

The hearing continues.