Disgraced inspector scheduled hundreds of sex worker meetings on GMP-issued phone
30 May 2025, 02:35 | Updated: 30 May 2025, 02:38
A former Greater Manchester Police inspector has been found to have contacted sex workers while on and off duty across five years.
Listen to this article
Loading audio...
An inspector will be barred from policing after it was discovered he had been arranging hundreds of meetings with sex workers over a five and a half year period.
Former inspector for Greater Manchester Police (GMP) Toby Knight used his force-issued phone to arrange 245 events with adult sex workers, sometimes at a rate of multiple a day.
The arranging of meetings took place between September 2018 and February 2024.
Of those, 165 were at a time when he was due to be on shift.
Read more: Andrew Tate and brother Tristan 'will return to UK' to defend rape charges, says lawyer
Read more: Father-of-three, 53, charged with seven offences after Liverpool parade incident
Examination of Knight's personal phone also found some 357 events which had been scheduled in the period between May 25, 2023, and April 2, 2024.
Of these, 29 were when he was on duty and 27 when he was recorded as having called in sick to work.
Knight served nearly 30 years with the police and retired on 28 May - - the day before a gross misconduct hearing concluded that had he still been serving he would have been dismissed without notice.
He did not attend the hearing chaired by chief resource officer Lee Rawlinson, who said that Knight "has chosen not to engage with this process".
A personal statement by Knight was read out in which the disgraced former officer said: "My career is not defined by this allegation because I am more than that."
But he also complained that as a result of the allegations his "career in the police would end in ignominy".
Knight joined GMP in 1997, and in his statement he described the world as a "very different place back then".
In 2024, he was arrested and admitted in a police interview that he was a "regular user" of sex workers, and that he had used both his GMP issued mobile phone and his personal phone to book appointments.
Some of the sex workers Knight made contact with were known to GMP.
The hearing, at Greater Manchester Police HQ, found that Knight had deliberately broken police regulation barring officers and police staff from visiting sex workers, as this would harm the reputation of the police and risk officers becoming compromised.
Mr Rawlinson told the hearing: "His actions were patently not appropriate and not of the standard expected of a police officer."
In addition to saying he would have been dismissed had he still been serving, Knight was added to the College of Policing's list of people barred from the profession.
