Met officer who falsely accused colleague of sexual assault after running late for work has sentence doubled
Her false claim led to an officer spending 23 hours in custody and being suspended from duty while detectives investigated the allegation
A former Met Police officer has had her prison sentence doubled after falsely accusing a colleague of sexual assault in a lie sparked by fears she was late for work.
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Lauren Evans, 34, was originally jailed for 12 months after falsely claiming she had been stopped and intimately searched by a plain-clothes officer while travelling to work in south London in March 2023.
Evans, from Maidstone in Kent, named her alleged attacker as “Watson”.
By coincidence, PC Alex Watson - an officer she had never met - was driving an unmarked car in the area that day.
He was arrested, spent 23 hours in custody and was suspended from duty while detectives investigated the allegation.
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It took a team of 30 officers around 1,500 hours to establish that the incident had not taken place, using CCTV and number-plate recognition footage.
Evans, who was based at Bromley Police Station, had sent a message to senior officers saying: “I’ve just been pulled over!!”
She repeated the allegation when she arrived at work, despite making it there on time.
She was convicted of perverting the course of justice at Southwark Crown Court in December and dismissed without notice by the force in January.
Her original 12-month sentence, imposed on 2 March, was referred to the Court of Appeal under the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme.
It has now been increased to two years.
Evans had already been released from prison and was ordered to surrender at Guildford Police Station to be returned to custody.
At her original sentencing, Judge Martin Griffith 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.”
PC Watson said his wife later left her own role in policing because it reminded her of his arrest, which took place in front of his wife and children at the family home.
Detective Chief Inspector Mark Cutler, from the Met’s Anti-Abuse and Corruption Command, said false claims of this nature undermined work to support victims of sexual offences.
“This allegation was investigated thoroughly and we found no evidence that the incident had taken place,” he said.