A policeman who befriended a young teenage girl and then kissed her on the lips when she visited him at his flat has narrowly escaped going to prison.
Instead, Russell Toohey was given a suspended jail sentence after a court heard how he moved the girl’s hand up his thigh over his clothes near to his groin.
Toohey, a PC who had served the community in Bedfordshire for 28 years first plied the girl, who was 15, with vodka and coke.
Later she made a complaint and the police constable was arrested by his colleagues at Dunstable Police station.
And when officers went to his flat in Leighton Buzzard and seized his computer, they discovered eight indecent photographs of other young girls aged between 13 and 16 that he had downloaded from the internet.
On Thursday his barrister Susanah Stevens told St Albans Crown Court his fall from grace had been “catastrophic.”
She told the court: “For a police officer this amounts to a catastrophic fall from the respectability and dignity he had previously held.”
In court Toohey, aged 52, pleaded guilty to sexual activity with a child, four offences of making indecent photos of a child and possessing indecent images.
George Heimler, prosecuting, told the court “This case relates to the defendant who was a serving Bedfordshire Police Officer at the time and who had served for the best part of three decades as a police officer.
The court heard how the defendant, who at the time was living in a flat in North Street, had got to know the girl.
It had been arranged that he would download some music onto her iPod and, on March 20 last year, she rang him and it was agreed she would call round to collect the iPod.
Mr Heimler said in the flat the girl was given vodka and coke to drink.
He went on: “He got hold of her hand and moved it up the top of his leg to the top of his thigh near to the groin.”
The prosecutor said Toohey then kissed the girl on her lips.
Later the girl was to tell police that although not a snog, the kiss had been longer than a “peck” and she said Toohey had engaged her in a conversation about sex and boys.
Following his arrest Toohey, now of Knowlands, Highworth in Swindon, resigned from Bedfordshire Police.
Miss Stevens, defending, told the court Toohey wished to apologise to the girl and her family.
She said before his arrest the officer had been highly regarded by his colleagues for his professionalism and his good arrest rate.
But she said he had now lost his good name, his friends and reputation.
“He appreciates he does have issue he needs to address,” she said.
Passing sentence Judge Stephen Warner told Toohey that what had taken place in his flat “represented a serious breach of trust”.
The judge told him he had taken advantage of the girl that evening.
He sentenced Toohey to six months imprisonment suspended for 18 month and placed him under the supervision of probation workers for the next 18 months.
He will also have to go on the Thames Valley Sex Offenders Programme and he was also made the subject of a Sexual Offences Prevention Order for the next six years.
His name will go on the Sex Offenders’ Register for the same period.
In addition he was fined £500 and ordered to pay £1,800 prosecution costs.
The judge also ordered the forfeiture and destruction of the computer equipment on which the images had been found.