2 days ago
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A senior Metropolitan police officer has been sacked for a second time after refusing to take a drugs test.
Commander Julian Bennett was initially dismissed by a misconduct panel in October 2023 over the incident, but he took his case to the police appeals tribunal (PAT) in July last year and had his sacking overturned.
He had been found to have committed gross misconduct by failing to provide a urine sample for a drugs test on 21 July 2020, which had led to his suspension shortly afterwards.
A panel found he breached professional standards when he refused to provide the sample after being called in to do so in the presence of an assistant commissioner, instead offering to resign on the spot and asking for a meeting with the Met’s then commissioner, Cressida Dick.
After the PAT’s decision to revoke the dismissal, the Met considered a legal challenge by way of a judicial review but decided Bennett should face a fresh misconduct hearing last September.
The allegation proven against Bennett was again found to be at the level of gross misconduct at the latest hearing.
The officer, who served in the force from 1976, had remained suspended throughout the process and will now be added to the College of Policing’s barred list.
The assistant commissioner Matt Twist said: “I am enormously concerned that almost five years since this incident happened we have only now been able to dismiss Commander Bennett. This should have been a simple matter. Commander Bennett has never disputed he refused a lawful order to take a drugs test.
“As a senior officer who had chaired misconduct hearings, Commander Bennett was highly experienced and knew full well what was required of him, yet he made a choice not to cooperate. He has been suspended on full pay for an extraordinary length of time. I am sure Londoners will be as outraged as we are at the utter waste of public funds spent paying a senior officer to sit at home suspended and not work.”
Twist added: “While the Met is not responsible for all the delays in Commander Bennett’s matter, we are also working hard to expedite cases and cut bureaucracy … I am confident a situation like Commander Bennett’s prolonged case would not happen again.”
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Bennett wrote the Met’s drugs strategy for 2017-21 as a commander for territorial policing. The document, called Dealing With the Impact of Drugs on Communities, set up plans to raise awareness of the impact of drug misuse.
He chaired misconduct panels over several years, and freedom of information requests showed he presided over 74 hearings involving 90 officers between June 2010 and February 2012, leading to 56 being dismissed.
