AT THE Leveson inquiry yesterday former Metropolitan police commissioner Paul Condon warned against “a massive bureaucratic overreaction” of tougher regulation governing contacts between the British press and police.
He accepted that more guidance for officers was needed to ensure proper conduct, as well as better auditing of the joint relationship, but he feared that police forces would go too far, following allegations that some of their members had been corrupted by press bribes.
“There could be a massive bureaucratic overreaction which won’t help anyone,” Lord Condon, who retired in 2000 after seven years as the UK’s highest-ranked police officer, told the inquiry into press standards.
“I would caution against a massive box-ticking or bureaucratic approach to any reform. A good working relationship between the police and the media is essential and in the public interest.”
However, he said, the acceptance of too much hospitality from journalists could be “the start of a grooming process which leads to inappropriate and unethical behaviour” on the back of “inappropriate closeness”.
Lord Condon said that during his time “a small but significant” number of policemen behaved in a totally unacceptable fashion, but he had not had “to the best of my recollection” any evidence of bribery of Met police officers by journalists.
“History suggests that corruption in the [force] is cyclical,” he said, adding that he had launched an investigation shortly after he took up office, which led to the homes of 30 police officers being raided.
In the 1990s press coverage of policing was dominated by just a few journalists, he said.
“The police service now has different challenges and fundamentally more opportunities to communicate directly with the public,” he told Lord Justice Leveson.
“You have police officers that are tweeting, blogging. The service is at a point where it needs to totally recalibrate how it provides information to the public via the media and social media.”
This, he said, was extremely damaging for British policing, since the police needed to have professional relations with the press to ensure that information could be transmitted accurately and quickly when required.
