Superintendent Novlett Robyn Williams, 59, commended for her work after the Grenfell Tower disaster, was sentenced to 200 hours of community service for possession of an indecent image in November 2019.
She was dismissed without notice from the Met after a special disciplinary hearing in March 2020 found her conviction amounted to gross misconduct. During Williams’ trial at the Old Bailey, jurors heard how she received a video of a five-year-old girl being sexually abused via WhatsApp from her older sister, Jennifer Hodge, so that the officer could investigate the footage.
But she failed to report the clip, and while the court accepted she had not viewed the video, the jury was not convinced she was unaware of it being on her phone.
However, last year, the highly decorated officer successfully appealed against the decision to dismiss her following her conviction and was reinstated as a police officer.
In June last year, the Police Appeals Tribunal (PAT) found that she should not have been sacked, and instead should have received a final written warning.
Earlier this month, the Met challenged this decision at the High Court in London, arguing it was ‘perverse and unreasonable’.
They said that sacking Williams’ was the ‘only possible outcome’.
Mrs Justice Heather Williams rejected the forces’s bid to overturn the decision to reinstate the convicted officer.
She said: ‘The PAT was entitled to regard this as an exceptional case in which dismissal for the officer’s gross misconduct was not a necessary and proportionate sanction.’
The judge continued: ‘The PAT reached the conclusion that it did because of the unique circumstances of the conviction, the officer’s stellar career, the substantial impact she had had on enhancing the reputation of the MPS as a whole and its assessment that her dismissal would reduce confidence in the police in some of the communities in which the MPS had struggled to gain trust.
‘This was a permissible conclusion for it to reach.’
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