Unnamed Cleveland Police officer sexually assaulted woman
Plus: Music to my ears as Ben Houchen claims to be levelling-up musical careers
The 47th edition of The Teesside Lead is risen!
It’s the most important weekend of the year for devout Christians and wrestling fans alike, with Wrestlemania taking place on Easter weekend for the first time in its 41 years.
This week’s edition sees news of a Cleveland Police officer found to have sexually assaulted his partner.
We also have another journalist following in The Teesside Lead’s footsteps, and as always, a little Ben Houchen porky.
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Leigh
An unnamed former Cleveland Police officer has been found to have sexually assaulted a female victim and taken intimate photos of them without their permission.
A misconduct hearing held over two days last week found the officer - who is only referred to as “Former PC X” - to have committed the offences, though a third charge of being in possession of a butterfly knife was not found proven.
The panel found five of six allegations against the officer proven on the balance of probabilities, and that the officer’s behaviour would have amounted to gross misconduct had he still been a member of Cleveland Police.
The former officer has not been named in order to protect the identity of their victim.
As a result of the misconduct hearing he can never work as a police officer again, although he only left Cleveland Police earlier this month.
Det Ch Insp Pete Littlewood said: “The hearing found that the officer would have been dismissed without notice, had he not already ceased employment with the force”, however, it’s not clear if the former officer is facing criminal charges.
The unnamed Cleveland officer’s misconduct hearing took place at the same time a Metropolitan officer was sentenced to four and a half years imprisonment for rape.
PC Sam McGregor was found guilty of raping a woman in London in May 2021 after his trial earlier this year. He was found to have deliberately targeted the victim when she was in a vulnerable situation, and woke up to being raped by him.
When interviewed by police, McGregor initially denied he’d had sex with the victim at all, but later changed his story to claim they’d had consensual sex when confronted with forensic evidence.
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If you’ve been reading The Teesside Lead for a while, you’ll know about my ongoing investigation into councillors who don’t pay council tax.
You’ll be pleased to know Local Democracy Reporter Daniel Holland, who covers things at the other end of the A19, has started looking into things on his patch.
So far he’s discovered court summons have been issued to at least eight councillors in the last three years in Newcastle and County Durham.
You can read more here.
Ben Houchen claims to launch long-running music grant
PRS Foundation is the charitable arm of PRS for Music, which is the main royalty collection society for musicians in the UK. Their members are largely songwriters (though latterly referred to as “rightsholders” in a sign of how the music industry works) who are owed money each time their copyrighted work is reproduced, e.g. by being broadcast.
In as simple a way as possible, there are two copyrights to a song you might hear on the radio - that of the composition (i.e. the notes and the order they’re played) and of the sound recording (i.e. the literal recording that you hear).
PRS for Music has different anachronistic societies all wrapped under one banner for the sake of collecting different sorts of royalties. PPL is the part of PRS which protects the copyright of sound recordings for its members.
Why am I talking about this? And why in so much detail?
After a decade working for record labels in London, my last employer in the industry before I became a journalist was PRS. So imagine my surprise this week to see my former and current lives coming together in a social media post by Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen.
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