A former Metropolitan Police officer has been convicted of sending a grossly offensive racist message.
Michael Chadwell, 62, shared the post with five other retired Met officers in a private Whatsapp group on September 28 last year.
All five officers admitted sending racist messages last month – including about the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle – in the same group.
Chadwell forwarded a graphic – created by someone else and shared on social media – showing a picture of different coloured parrots, above a picture of children of different races, City of London Magistrates’ Court heard.
Text on the images said: ‘Why do we cherish the variety of colour in every species… but our own?’ – underneath which a comment in response said ‘because I have never had a bike stolen out of my front yard by a parrot’.
Chadwell – who formerly served in the Met’s Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command and Counter Terrorism Command – insisted he didn’t believe the ‘joke’ was racist.
He denied a single count of sending by public communication a grossly offensive racist message – but was convicted today after a trial at the court.
District Judge Tan Ikram said the ‘absolute clear implication’ of the post is that ‘black people steal’, adding: ‘It’s a clearly racist generalisation and characterisation, and caricature of ethnic people.
‘I have no doubt in my mind that it’s grossly offensive.’
Giving evidence, Chadwell said he agreed with the text on the original post, telling the court: ‘The reason I’ve sent the joke is because what’s written underneath is silly, it’s a riposte, someone has written something funny underneath.
‘Whilst agreeing with the imagery in the first part, what’s written underneath is a piece of silliness that’s been said about it.
‘My reason for (posting) it into the group was because of what the person had written on Facebook underneath, which I felt was Dadaist, surreal and a little bit Monty Python.’
Convicting Chadwell, the district judge said: ‘It was a message sent by the defendant on to the WhatsApp group and it was, I am sure, grossly offensive.’
Chadwell, from Liss in Hampshire, ‘joined in’ with criminal offending in the group by sending jokes, the judge said.
‘I noted with interest how he reacted to other messages (in the WhatsApp group) which he said had been sent by his friends and, I have to say, I was troubled by some reluctance on his part to say at least one of them is racist at all.
‘He posted the whole thing. He thought it was funny but it was grossly offensive and he was aware of that at the time. That is why I find the defendant guilty of this offence.’
Chadwell is due to be sentenced on December 8 alongside five co-defendants -former Met Police officers Robert Lewis, 62, of Camberley, Surrey; Peter Booth, 66, of Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire; Anthony Elsom, 67, of Bournemouth, Dorset; Alan Hall, 65, of Stowmarket, Suffolk; and Trevor Lewton, 65, of Swansea, South Wales.
Some of the messages they shared also referred to the Prince and Princess of Wales, the late Queen and the late Duke of Edinburgh, together with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, former home secretary Priti Patel and ex-health secretary, Sajid Javid.
The messages, sent between September 2020 and 2022, emerged after a BBC Newsnight investigation in October last year, which prompted a probe by the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards.
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