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South Wales Police chief constable regrets allowing BBC to film his officers

21/03/2012

The chief constable of South Wales Police has told the Leveson Inquiry he regrets allowing officers to be filmed for the BBC One programme Traffic Cops.Peter Vaughan said the televised behavior of some officers was not representative of the force.He told the inquiry: “Some of those instances aren’t the organisation that I want to reflect as being representative of the South Wales Police.”Vaughan said frequent repeats of the programmes, filmed some years ago, was damaging to the force’s reputation, and is used as an example when training new officers in standards.He added: “It’s shaped the way we engage with the media.“It’s very important that we’re help to account for our activities and its important that the public sees that policing isn’t just knocking down peoples doors, discovering cannabis plants and dealing with violent people.”Catherine Llewellyn, press officer for South Wales Police, said the media were generally cooperative when asked not to publish certain material that could affect investigations and prosecutions. She gave the example of a journalist obtaining a restricted internal document from the force.She said: “We advised them that it would cause untold damage, not just to the investigation but it would also upset the family [of a suspect], and asked them not to publish it. They didn’t publish it and they have never published that information.”Vaughan told the inquiry the force had investigated three suspected leaks to the press in the past five years. One of these, where the address of a police officer was revealed turned out to have come from open proceedings in court.He told the inquiry leaks were often the result of “misplaced loyalty” by members of staff.He added: “One of the examples we had in our anti-corruption unit, one of the examples we followed through, was a member of our staff providing information to a private detective who was a previous colleague of that individual. There is misguided loyalty; on occasions there will be money exchanging hands for that sort of information. “The chief constable said South Wales Police had a generally positive relationship with the press.Llewellyn added: “I think throughout [our] guidelines there’s an encouragement there to our officers to speak [to journalists], but obviously within guidelines and when it’s appropriate.”She added: “Often journalists will be trying to deal with very busy police officer, and a press officer intervening may actually speed up the information."

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