Police officer invented sex assault because she was late for work
Police officer invented sex assault because she was late for work
Telegraph reportersWed, July 29, 2026 at 2:58 PM UTC
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Lauren Evans was convicted of perverting the court of justice - Metropolitan Police/Metropolitan Police
A female police officer falsely claimed that she had been assaulted as a reason for being late for work.
Lauren Evans, 35, claimed a plain-clothes officer carried out an intimate search after stopping her as she drove to work in south London on March 22, 2023.
She provided the surname Watson for the man and a description of his unmarked police car, prompting the arrest of Pc Alex Watson, an innocent officer, who happened to have been driving an unmarked car in the area.
Evans, attached to the South Area Basic Command Unit, was jailed for 12 months at Southwark Crown Court in March and dismissed from the police.
However, she has now had her sentence for perverting the court of justice increased to two years in prison after it was referred to the Court of Appeal under the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme.
She had already been released from prison at the time of the decision, and was ordered to surrender to Guildford police station to be returned.
‘Tried to fool a jury’
Judge Martin Griffith previously told the officer that she had probably made up the allegation as an excuse for being late.
He said: “It’s a great shame – you have lost your job, his wife has given up her job, all through a simple lie told in circumstances which must have had something to do with being late. You tried to fool a jury by telling them you were innocent.”
He said her actions had a “catastrophic effect” on the officer and his family. Pc Watson was held in a cell for 23 hours at the time of the allegation, although was subsequently exonerated and released without charge.
Thirty police officers were assigned to investigate Evans’s allegations, with more than 1,500 hours of police time spent after she texted senior officers on her way to work, claiming that she had been pulled over.
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In his victim impact statement Pc Watson said his wife of 18 years had to leave her role as police staff as it reminded her of his arrest.
He said he had just returned from a family wedding when he was handcuffed and arrested in front of his terrified children. The house was searched, leading to his children now feeling unsafe in the home, he said.
“The effect of the arrest was catastrophic. I’m a proud serving police officer and my wife and I have combined police service of 30 years,” he said.
“We felt betrayed and let down by the organisation we had worked so much for. I was treated like a criminal and handcuffed like a violent criminal.”
He said some neighbours no longer spoke to him after his arrest. “To make up an allegation of this nature I find disgraceful,” he said.
In her statement Kerry Watson, his wife, said her husband had become “a shell of his former self” and the couple struggled to socialise.
“I now don’t work for the Met Police, a place I had so many happy memories, but I could not work in a place which continually reminded me of that night and how someone could lie and change my husband and our children’s lives forever,” she said. “I will never understand why.”
Previously, Det Ch Insp Mark Cutler, from the Met’s anti-abuse and corruption command, said: “Officers should act with integrity at all times and lying about such a serious allegation is completely unacceptable.
“It undermines the work that takes place across the Met every day to support victims of sexual offences and it will not be tolerated.
“This has been a complex investigation which started following an allegation against another officer. This allegation was investigated thoroughly, and we found no evidence that the incident had taken place.”
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Source: “AOL Breaking”
