South Yorkshire Police worker sacked for watching porn blames force for not monitoring him closely enough

Steven Connor was fired from his back of office job as an administration support officer when it was found he had been accessing explicit sites on a near daily basis for almost two years using police equipment.

He was found out after officers became suspicious and used monitoring software to see when the words ‘sexy’ or ‘porn’ were looked up on police computers.

And on the day his bosses confronted him in 2019, they found he had a tab open to an explicit website at the time.

An investigation found that across two years on the job, Mr Connor had viewed X-rated material on 299 days in a 316 day period.

Mr Connors, who had worked for the force for 20 years, admitted the breach “immediately” and was sacked for gross misconduct.

But soon after, he lodged an appeal, claiming he could not have been “of a reasonable mind” to dare such behaviour while working for the police.

“To exhibit such behaviour in any workplace is more than likely to be exposed,” reasoned Mr Connor in a letter to the tribunal.

“Considering my employer was a police force, the risk of detection must be assumed to be at the highest level.

“So clearly, I was not giving any conscious and reasoned thought to what I was doing, therefore my actions were not those of a reasonable mind.

“I am truly very sorry and regret what I have done.”

Further, he criticised the police by claiming if they had been monitoring him properly they could have put a stop to it sooner.

“[Mr Connor] has tried to argue that the respondent [SYP] should have monitored internet use more closely,” a report by the Government’s Employment Tribunal service reads.

“If it had done so, Mr Connor argues, the respondent would have identified the pattern of behaviour earlier.

“The Tribunal considers that that is a further attempt by Mr Connor to blame the respondent for his own persistent misconduct.

“[SYP] had to consider what the public would think if they were aware that an employee had viewed pornographic websites on 299 days out of 316, and remained in the respondent’s employment.

“One only has to consider the recent furore caused by a Conservative MP viewing pornography in the House of Commons on a limited number of occasions, to imagine what the public might think of that.”

In further criticism of the force, Mr Connor claimed he, too, was “shocked” to learn that his device had visited one of the explicit websites over 35,000 times, and argued the police had not considered this was actually the work of hackers, pop ups and ‘browser hijacking’.

“If that was the case however, that was because of the claimant’s misconduct in accessing pornographic websites in the first place,” the report reads.

Throughout the disciplinary process, Mr Connor expressed “deep remorse and regret” for the breach, writing in one letter he found it “extremely hard to come to terms with what I did”.

Mr Connor’s appeal against unfair dismissal was rejected, as was a claim for direct disability discrimination and alleged harassment.