'Favouritism' warning over press coverage of police raids

Police are exposing themselves to claims of "favouritism" by inviting selected journalists to attend raids and arrests, a former detective constable and Crimewatch presenter has warned.

Jacqui Hames, who appeared on the BBC's monthly crime programme from 1990 to 2006 and retired from the Metropolitan police in 2008, said press "tag-alongs" could, in some cases, be inappropriate and lend a "comic book quality" to a serious police operation.

She said the Metropolitan police's "open door policy" meant the police were "encouraged, or sometimes even ordered, to open up" to the media, and that in the early days this "created something of a free-for-all for the press".

Hames, who now gives media training to senior police officers, gave the example of a 2006 raid at a gold bullion depot near Heathrow airport, to which Daily Mirror reporter Jeff Edwards was "personally invited" with a photographer.

"The police don't get a lot of credit for successful operations, but it has to be appropriate," she told the Leveson inquiry today.

"Many of my colleagues felt that photographing a man who'd just been arrested and putting it on the front page of a paper was inappropriate. People are innocent until proven guilty.

"This by any stretch of the imagination puts him firmly in the latter category. Judgment by national newspaper is not appropriate."

Hames added: "It's not necessarily inappropriate that the press are invited along, and I think the workings of police should be open and transparent. But the effect of this was that many newspaper outlets didn't cover the story particularly well, if at all.

"It didn't receive the widespread publicity it could have done if they'd selected one or two people to cover it for a group. I think that would have been a fairer and more transparent way. It leaves the police service open to criticism of favouritism."

Hames said her experience was that the Crime Reporters' Association was something of a "gentleman's drinking club", where officers liaised with favoured journalists.

She told the inquiry: "It was well known that certain police officers had a predilection for certain journalists and publications. The Crime Reporters' Association was very much a select club.

"I don't know if that's the case now because I'm detached from it, but for many years it was a very close-knit group of people who had access to some information that some police officers didn't have."

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