Met Police: South London officer 'tampered with evidence'

Tom Coling, who spent four years working at the South London Child Abuse Investigation Team, went public with the allegation in 2021.

He told the Telegraph that after he and a colleague seized evidence, they were ordered to put it all back and re-stage the scene because another team was taking over and would start from scratch.

While he refused to execute the order, he said, his colleague obeyed it, meaning all the evidence was potentially contaminated.

The incident was among a catalogue of alleged misconduct that he later described in a series of formal complaints, but the Met rejected every concern he raised.

The Metropolitan Police Service claimed in 2021 that Tom’s allegations had been “thoroughly investigated” and no evidence was found of the scene being re-staged.

However, the News Shopper has spoken to a witness who confirmed that Tom raised concerns about the alleged incident immediately after it happened.

Jan Pyle worked as a police officer for 20 years, including several years with Tom in the child abuse unit.

“He doesn’t lie”

Jan said she clearly remembered Tom approaching her to express his horror at the instruction to tamper with evidence.

Asked how much detail she remembered about the conversation, Jan said: “Everything. Because he was just mortified. He wouldn’t do it.

“With Tom, what you see is what you get. He doesn’t lie. He wouldn’t do anything that was wrong or against the law. He wouldn’t do it.”

The Met Police claimed in 2021 that a witness “did not support” Tom’s account.

But the witness was the colleague who Tom said had obeyed the order. Had they admitted what they’d done, they could have lost their job.

“She wouldn’t speak up because she was due to retire and didn’t want to lose her pension, which I think is diabolical,” said Jan.

She disputed that there had been a thorough investigation, saying that no investigator had ever contacted her, despite working in the same Team as Tom.

“No one asked me at all,” said Jan.

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Tom Coling said he was bullied out of the Met Police Service after raising concerns about inappropriate conduct and orders from senior staff (Image: Charles Thomson)

“Contaminating the scene”

When his colleague on the baby death case first relayed the order from a senior officer, said Tom, he told her: “You must have misheard them.”

She told Tom they’d been ordered to “put everything back” because the serious complex team was coming to take over.

Unable to believe such an order had been given, Tom phoned and put the senior officer on loud speaker.

“We were in the older sibling’s bedroom,” he said. “We’ve seized everything. Everything is forensically packaged, it’s all by the front door, ready to go. We were literally waiting for the order to leave the scene.

“They said, ‘I’m telling you, put it all back’. I said, ‘No chance. I’m not doing that. We’re contaminating the scene’. They repeated the order.”

Tom rejected the notion that a “thorough investigation” had been conducted into the incident, saying: “No one has ever spoken to me.”

He said it was “ludicrous” to suggest that a thorough investigation had not corroborated his account.

After the job, he said, he submitted a statement recounting the entire incident, as well as all of the photos he had taken of the evidence being seized and bagged.

“There were tens of photos, if not hundreds,” he said.

Met Police

When the News Shopper put Jan Pyle’s comments to the Met, it did not address them.

It simply repeated its 2021 statement, saying the matter was “thoroughly investigated” and that Tom’s colleague on the job “did not support [his] version of events”.

“There was no indication that anyone may have committed a criminal offence, nor behaved in a manner that would justify disciplinary proceedings,” the force said.

It added: “Any allegation of evidence tampering is of course taken extremely seriously.”