'Common practice' for police to photograph dead bodies on personal phones

Metropolitan Police officers used their personal phones to take evidence photos, including pictures of dead bodies, a misconduct hearing has heard.

The internal Scotland Yard probe also heard that police routinely sent evidence pictures to each other on WhatsApp as a "workaround" to compress files before emailing and uploading them to the Met system.

Police officers argued keeping photos on personal devices was "common practice" because work issued phones did not take good enough quality pictures.

One officer was found to have kept a picture of dead bodies and showed colleagues "a bad one" at a training session.

Police Constable Billy Manning was found to have kept a photo of a badly decomposed elderly man on his phone and showed the "bad one" to colleagues during a training session, making two of them feel "very uncomfortable", the hearing was told.

His arrest and the subsequent investigation has revealed confusion - even within the force's senior leadership team - about whether officers should be allowed to use their personal phones for police work.

The misconduct hearing heard that PC Manning and PC Zak Malik had been called to an old people's home in Dalston, east London in September 2021.

The officers found a resident who had died "some days or weeks earlier" and whose body had reached a severe state of decomposition.

PC Malik took a photo of the dead man on his personal phone before sending them to PC Manning on WhatsApp.

He sent them to reduce the file size so it could be uploaded to the Met system and go to the coroner, the hearing was told.

PC Manning deleted the photo from his iPhone library but did not delete it from his WhatsApp thread, the panel heard.

When PC Malik realised the photo was still on WhatsApp and warned PC Manning, he replied with three laughing face emojis.

At a taser training course the following year, PC Manning showed other officers the photo of the man who had died in the course of the conversation about "difficult situations".

The panel heard he said: "I've been to a bad one, I will show you the picture."

Two of the officers "felt very uncomfortable" and reported him to their seniors.

PC Manning was arrested and his mobile was seized, with analysis of its content revealing a number of other pictures "relating to victims, suspects and evidence".

He claimed it was "common practice".

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Another officer told the hearing he attended a separate sudden-death callout with PC Manning where photos had also been taken on personal phones, but he could not remember who took them.

The investigation led to misconduct proceedings against PC Manning and the second officer, PC Frankie Jordan.

PC Jordan told investigators he "did not believe that he had done anything wrong" and that "he and colleagues routinely took photos of evidence on their personal mobile phones and sent them to colleagues via WhatsApp".

He said he and his colleagues had not been allocated work mobile phones and that the police issue tablets were "sub-standard".

Criminal charges were not pursued, but the investigation led to misconduct proceedings against PC Manning and PC Jordan.

After more officers came forward to report that they used their own devices, the senior leadership team met in February 2022, where it was decided that personal phones should never be used for a policing purpose.

The Metropolitan Police was approached for comment.

(c) Sky News 2026: 'Common practice' for police to photograph dead bodies on personal phones