A police emergency calls handler is to appeal after being sacked for “laughing unprofessionally”.
Sue Heeney, who was working for Essex Police, was sacked following a call made in November last year by a man who thought a relative had been involved in a crash whilst drink driving. The man was nervous and Ms Heeney alleges that she tried to put him at ease and the pair laughed when the man could not remember the phonetic alphabet for the letter “E”.
She thought nothing more of the incident until informed that she was being suspended for a negligent and unprofessional manner, before being eventually sacked in July. The force said that, as well as laughing unprofessionally, she had graded the incident wrongly, stating it was a “road traffic incident – fail to stop” rather than the “suspicious circumstances” it turned out to be, especially so as the driver in the crash was later sent to prison.
Ms Heeney insisted that she had graded the incident correctly according to the facts she had been given which were minimal. A spokeswoman for the force said that: “The failure to properly assess the gravity of this incident led to her being investigated by the force’s professional standards department.”