A former Met Police detective who sprayed her neighbour with a garden hose after a row about her dog’s waste has been found to have committed gross misconduct.
A misconduct panel heard how relations between ex-Detective Sergeant Mel Chinn and her neighbours deteriorated because of an argument over their boundary, which was then exacerbated by DS Chinn washing dog excrement into her neighbour’s garden.
The tribunal ruled the former officer would have been handed a final written warning for her “intimidating” behaviour had she not already left the force.
A panel heard how DS Chinn fell out with her neighbours over a dispute about their boundary wall, with their puppy “taught to toilet” in a crate immediately adjacent to the fence dividing their properties.
She told the hearing that she would “clean up after the dog” by removing poo and urine from the crate and washing it down the passageway into a drain with water and Fairy Liquid.
But her neighbours told how the urine or the faeces then washed into their garden in what they compared to “Chinese water torture” and called a “deliberate attempt to antagonise”.
When one of the neighbours began spraying the lower half of the fence on August 1 2022, to get rid of the smell of urine and to stop “flies gathering”, the panel heard that DS Chinn then deliberately targeted her hose at her.
She accused her neighbour of having mental health issues and of being “unhinged” during the altercation.
In another incident, the panel heard how DS Chinn also sprayed one of her neighbours in a separate ‘urine’ row in May 2022, which she denied.
Ruling that she had committed gross misconduct, the panel said the public “would be dismayed to see an experienced police officer behaving in such a way towards anyone, let alone their next door neighbour,” adding that the “spraying episodes had a threatening and abusive element to them.”
It added: “The numerous incidences of washing of urine and/or faeces onto their neighbour's land was targeted at those neighbours.
“The Panel has found that former DS Chinn knew, by 24th May 2022 at the latest, what was happening and rather than finding an alternative to the washing arrangements, she carried on regardless, in full knowledge of the distress it was causing.”
However, it said there was no evidence “any of the misconduct was pre-planned”, but that DS Chinn “ought to have known better than to act in the way she did.”
It added the behaviour “has been out of character” and that she may have perceived her neighbour’s actions as provocative.
