A Metropolitan Police detective inspector has been sacked and permanently barred from rejoining the force after saving naked pictures of a junior female colleague on not one but two official police-issued work phones — despite the images having been shared consensually during a romantic relationship.
Detective Inspector Ben Coogan, 49, who had served with the Metropolitan Police for more than 26 years and held a senior role as strategic lead for domestic abuse investigations across three London boroughs, was dismissed without notice following an accelerated misconduct hearing in April. The decision was published on 26 May.
The hearing found that five sexually explicit images of the woman — a serving police officer of lower rank who did not report directly to Coogan — had been saved to his work devices between May and July 2025. The images had originally been sent to him consensually while the pair were in a romantic relationship. The problem arose when Coogan transferred them from his personal phone onto his Met-issued handset. After saving four of the images on his first work phone, he lost that device and saved a fifth image on the replacement phone issued to him.
Coogan told a November interview under caution: “I recorded the images on my work phone, intending just to review them and then delete.” He denied showing them to anyone else and accepted the specified conduct breaches before the hearing, but did not accept that his actions amounted to gross misconduct.
The hearing chair, Commander Andy Brittain, disagreed. He found the behaviour serious on multiple grounds. Even though the images were shared consensually between adults, the hearing determined it was unclear whether the woman had agreed to their capture and storage on entirely separate devices. Brittain found the conduct “deliberate and repeated” and concluded that saving personal sexualised material on official devices created potential harm by “mixing personal sexualised material with legitimate policing material on a device used to communicate with members of the public — including victims of crime — and receive and communicate about police work.”
The reputational harm to the Metropolitan Police was judged to be high. “It undermines public confidence in the police,” Brittain found. The decision stated that dismissal without notice and entry on the barring list was the only viable outcome, permanently preventing Coogan from ever rejoining any police force.
At the time of his dismissal Coogan was responsible for 12 detective sergeants and 60 detective constables. The case comes amid ongoing scrutiny of the Metropolitan Police’s professional standards, following a string of misconduct cases in recent years that have repeatedly tested public confidence in the force.
