Greater Manchester Police’s security measures have been improved following the theft of £400,000 worth of cocaine from police property stores by what was described in Liverpool Crown Court as a “hopelessly, irredeemably corrupted” officer. Between 2018 and 2020, Detective Constable Andrew Talbot stole 4kg of the drug and used police systems to find a dealer through whom he could sell it in Manchester.
Talbot was sentenced to 19 years in prison. He was caught when an officer found cocaine in his coat as he arrived for work in February 2020. Security measures have since been “tightened” up, according to Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Stephen Watson. Speaking on BBC Radio Manchester, Watson said police often dealt with “significant quantities of drugs and cash”, adding: “there was a character who could not be trusted” within the force.
Watson said the force relied on trust at the “heart of all these processes” and admitted he had personally fired Talbot and told him he had become “hopelessly corrupted”. He said good levels of security and scrutiny were always in place but that the weakness had been a lack of trust.
Listeners to the radio phone-in, on which Watson spoke out about the incident, asked how the cocaine had been taken from police stores, which Watson described as a “valid question”. Watson emphasised that he was now happy that the system had been improved and that such an event was “entirely unlikely to happen again
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