A former Metropolitan Police superintendent thanked the jury as he was cleared of possessing and distributing child sex abuse images.

Bernie Gravett, 65, living in Bicester at the time of his arrest in 2017 but now of Hove, Sussex, was accused of collecting 47 indecent images of children and sending one of the images to another online.

But the retired senior officer, who had won praise for working with Romanian authorities to crack human trafficking rings, denied both making or distributing the sex abuse images.

He told jurors he had the images as he was giving a talk to officials in Georgia later in 2017 on various aspects of exploitation and human trafficking.

It was important to ‘expose’ the audience to the images – the ‘horrible part of policing’ – and show a range of different images to ‘promote discussion that then leads to understanding’.

He compared seeing the images to seeing a dead body as a young police constable. “You had to be exposed to these things in order to be able to understand them and manage them internally,” said the ex-policeman who, after his retirement from the Met spent two months with police in Jersey in 2011 before leaving for ‘personal reasons’. Since leaving the force he has worked as an independent consultant.

Gravett, who prosecutors claimed had posted about sick sexual fantasies with underage girls on an erotic literature website, said he was also investigating female child abusers. It was through these investigations that he had ‘distributed’ an indecent image.

It was for the jury to decide whether it was more likely than not that it was ‘necessary’ for Gravett to have the indecent images to ‘prevent, detect or investigate’ crimes and that he had a ‘legitimate reason’ to distribute the image.

Richard Milne, for the Crown, told jurors in his closing speech that the defendant’s explanations did not ‘hold water’ and he had ‘stretched’ his expertise around human trafficking and sexual exploitation ‘to breaking point’.

Given the sensitivity and confidentiality of the images, why were they not stored in a password-protected folder, with detailed file titles or notes setting out the category of image – A, B or C, Mr Milne pondered.

No drafts for the Georgia presentation had been found on his computer prior to it being seized by the police in April 2017.

Had he wanted to ‘track down’ female sexual predators online, why was he posing as a 59-year-old man, using a nom de plume and sending a ‘charming’ holiday photo of himself.

“You might track down young girls you are interested in old men, but how are you going to track down female sexual predators?” Mr Milne asked and urged the jury to look at a transcript of an online conversation between the defendant and another. “Is it an investigation or is it an old man…sexting a young girl?”

Mr Milne reminded the jury that Gravett had lied in his first police interview, claiming not to know the alias he had used online.

Defending, Lee Sergent said of his client: “This is a man who was doing this not to feed any form of sexual interest in children but as part of his tireless…desire of Mr Gravett to try and challenge criminality, fight against, investigate [and] research child exploitation.”

Had he been interested in indecent images of children, his client might have been expected to have more images and of a more graphic nature. Rather, he had only still images – and the 31 accessible files were on a USB stick.

Mr Sergent cautioned the jury against carrying out an ‘Ofsted-style’ assessment of his client’s investigative or administrative approach in terms of how he evidenced his collection of the images or how they were stored. The USB stick on which the accessible images were found was usually kept in a locked drawer.

A number of character witnesses attested to Gravett’s conscientiousness. They included one, Vladimir Dashi, for whose court case against the Home Office the defendant had compiled a comprehensive report detailing how trafficking worked.

He ‘came across as somebody who was very professional and empathetic to my situation’, Mr Dashi said – adding he had been ‘completely shocked’ to learn of the allegations.

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This story was written by Tom Seaward. He joined the team in 2021 as Oxfordshire's court and crime reporter.  

To get in touch with him email: Tom.Seaward@newsquest.co.uk

Follow him on Twitter: @t_seaward