A Metropolitan Police commander has been dismissed from the service for the second time after refusing to take a drugs test.
Commander Julian Bennett was found guilty of gross misconduct at a fresh hearing this week, almost five years after he initially refused to provide a urine sample when there was reasonable cause to suspect he had taken drugs.
The senior officer, who served with the force from 1976 and authored the Met’s drugs strategy for 2017-21, was first dismissed in October 2023. However, the Police Appeals Tribunal quashed that decision in July 2024 on technical grounds, ordering a new hearing.
Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist expressed frustration at the prolonged case, saying: “I am enormously concerned that almost five years since this incident happened we have only now been able to dismiss Commander Bennett.
“This should have been a simple matter. Commander Bennett has never disputed he refused a lawful order to take a drugs test. As a senior officer who had chaired misconduct hearings, Commander Bennett was highly experienced and knew full well what was required of him, yet he made a choice not to co-operate.”
The misconduct hearing heard that on 21 July 2020, Bennett refused to provide a urine sample for a drugs test after being informed there was reasonable cause to suspect he had taken drugs, including cannabis, LSD and magic mushrooms. He was suspended from duty three days later and has remained on full pay throughout the five-year process.
Bennett had been called to provide the sample in the presence of an assistant commissioner but instead offered to resign on the spot and requested a meeting with the then-commissioner, Cressida Dick.
Two additional allegations against Bennett were found not proven: that he smoked cannabis between February 2019 and July 2020 whilst off duty, and that he gave an untrue explanation for refusing the drugs test.
Twist criticised the financial cost of the prolonged case: “He has been suspended on full pay for an extraordinary length of time. I am sure Londoners will be as outraged as we are at the utter waste of public funds spent paying a senior officer to sit at home suspended and not work.”
Bennett wrote the Met’s anti-drugs strategy document titled “Dealing With the Impact of Drugs on Communities” and chaired numerous misconduct panels during his career. Freedom of information requests revealed he presided over 74 hearings involving 90 officers between June 2010 and February 2012, resulting in 56 dismissals.
The Police Appeals Tribunal had overturned the original dismissal on the technical basis that the panel had ruled on matters outside the scope of the allegations they were asked to consider. The Met considered mounting a judicial review but decided instead to proceed with a fresh hearing.
Bennett will now be added to the College of Policing’s barred list, preventing him from being employed by police forces and related organisations.
“In the last few years the Met has been making greater use of accelerated misconduct hearings to fast-track cases where the evidence is irrefutable. This allows us to dismiss officers far more quickly… I am confident a situation like Commander Bennett’s prolonged case would not happen again,” Twist said.
