Legal News

Of the several cases documented, by the Guardian in an investigation last month into the scale of abuse of power by police officers and police community support officers targeting women and vulnerable individuals to sexual harassment or assaulting them, Mike Johnson’s case is one.
A female officer of police was sexually assaulted in a bar by a Johnson said she would never go out with another group of police officers again because she did not trust them.
Mike Johnson, 37, of the Humberside police force, was sentenced to a 12-month community order and curfew after admitting sexually assaulting her last year. He was also ordered to sign the sex offenders' register for five years.
Bradford crown court heard on Thursday that Johnson assaulted the woman during a night out with colleagues in a bar near Hull city centre in May last year.
Johnson twice put his arm around the small of the woman's back in the space of 20 minutes in an "inappropriate" manner, the court heard. On the second occasion he ran his fingers down over the back of her clothing and touched her in the private area, the court heard.
At the time she had a number of personal difficulties, was engaging in counseling and therapy, and making good progress, which, she said, was thrown off by this conduct.
Sentencing Johnson at Bradford crown court on Thursday, Judge John Potter said that what he had done had been "nothing less than sexual abuse".
Johnson was the third member of the Humberside force to be investigated for sexual offences in the last 17 months.
His sentence has come at a time when the Independent Police Complaints Commission was carrying out an inquiry into the force's investigations of such allegations following a complaint by a woman, in one of the three Humberside cases, about the way her claim had been handled.
The Guardians investigation revealed concerns that the problem could be more widespread than previously believed.
In June, Gary Hastings, a former Humberside police community support officer, was jailed for 10 years for child sex offences. He resigned from the Humberside force after being suspended during the investigation.
It also emerged last week that a second PCSO has also been investigated by the force's department of professional standards after a woman complained of an assault when he visited her while on duty on 31 January.
The officer resigned from the force in February avoiding any disciplinary actions as he was never charged with a criminal offence.
The woman complained about how the case was investigated to the IPCC and the watchdog announced it was starting an independent investigation into how Humberside dealt with her allegations.
Next month the IPCC and the Association of Chief Police Officers would publish a report examining the issue.