PC Jonathon Cobban, 35, PC William Neville, 33, and Joel Borders, 45, a former officer, listened from the dock as the comments they allegedly made were read out by the prosecution at Westminster Crown Court. The three are accused of sharing racist and misogynistic messages between April 5 and August 9, 2019 in a WhatsApp group that included them and other officers. The positions were discovered in the group after Couzens was arrested for the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021. The messages included one in which Neville told others on the team about a recent shift when he had pinned down a 15-year-old girl, referring to it as a “race match,” a remark prosecutors allege was the perpetrator’s rape fantasy. Coban went on during the same exchange in August 2019 to say that such an approach was “always useful” and that these were “good skills” for a police officer, the court heard. Other comments included Cobban and Borders implying that victims of domestic abuse encouraged the physical and psychological torture they were subjected to, said Edward Brown QC, prosecuting. “DV victims love it. That’s why they are repeat victims most of the time,” Coban reportedly wrote in a message in June 2019. Brown told the court in his opening statement that police officers should be a safe haven for victims of domestic abuse. Of the comments, he said: “Coming from the mouth of a police officer who has a duty to serve and protect such vulnerable members of society and whose role should be not only to ignore such thinking but to actively work against it , is gross. insulting.” In another message, Borders is accused of predicting access to police firearms and being able to shoot someone in the face, then asked Coban about what it would be like to use a Taser on someone with Down syndrome. Brown said members of the public would approach a police officer for understanding and support, not abuse. “This needs to be seen in context and in conjunction with the need to maintain public confidence in the police,” he said. Cobban, from Didcot, Oxfordshire, is charged with five counts of sending a grossly offensive, obscene, obscene or threatening message on a public electronic communications network. Neville, of Weybridge, Surrey, is charged with two counts of the same offense and Borders, of Preston, Lancashire, faces five counts of the same offence. They deny the charges against them. The defendants were part of a “close group” of officers who shared messages on WhatsApp and there was no evidence that they or any member of the group “shouted” or challenged offensive comments, Brown said. The group totaled seven people, five of whom were Met trainees, including the three accused. The defendants had previous experience as officers in the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) and each was a serving student and then probationary officer in the Met at the time the messages were sent. During 2017, when Cobban was at CNC, he had volunteered to take on the additional responsibility of being the “competition and diversity watchdog” for the unit. “Each of the defendants was a serving police officer, trained and employed to protect and support the citizens of a very different city,” Brown told the court, adding that each of the messages surrounding their charges were clearly offensive to any target . role model. The WhatsApp group included a participant, called ‘Kate’, who is currently a Met constable and who undertook training at the same time as the defendants, the court heard. In an April 2019 message referring to “Kate,” Borders wrote: “She’s going to use me as an example. Lead me and shut me up when I rush her and hit her! Sneaky bitch.” Other messages included derogatory references to areas of London such as Hounslow, which Coban referred to disparagingly, noting the local Somali community and the sounds of the Muslim call to prayer. Borders joined in, adding that a similarly diverse area, Feltham, was “worse”. The court heard that in interviews Coban said his comment about victims of domestic violence was “a joke, in very bad taste”. He said a reference to being in the center of Hounslow as “walking along a Dulux color code” was meant to refer to the “vibrancy of the area”. Borders said his comment about the rape and beating of “Kate” was meant to be “dark humor” but he did not think violence against women or rape was funny. The trial continues.
