TWO crooked police call handlers have been jailed after leaking secret information to their criminal boyfriends.
Jessica Fitzhugh and Ellie-Mae Doherty, both 22, accessed personal details about their “undesirable” lovers while working for Derbyshire Police.
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Doherty had only been working for the force for three months when she divulged information to her boyfriend about a planned drug bust.
But she was caught when a message was found on her partner’s phone, saying: “My bird who works at Ripley police got into work and texted me to ring Stirch but was five minutes too late.”
Doherty has now been jailed for 11 months while Fitzhugh was locked up for four months at Leicester Crown Court.
Judge Timothy Spencer KC called them “naive” 19-year-olds whom he “loosely” described as “girlfriends of two undesirable young men”.
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He said: “Regrettably and for reasons that now you will find impossible to rationalise, you both flaunted the clear training, the clear direction and the clear guidelines you were given by the Derbyshire Police.
“In your case Ellie-Mae Doherty it went further because the information you accessed was clearly passed on in two distinct ways at two distinct times.”
The court was told Fitzhugh started working at the force in January 2023, aged 19, as a call handler and then a dispatcher.
She referred her friend Doherty for a job, who joined as a call handler in September 2023.
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Both women went through “intense” vetting and were required to read and sign declarations saying that they had no contacts who were “engaged in criminal activities”.
Prosecuting, Helen Rodger said each had a sexual relationship with men involved in crime, and should have known that these were “disclosable associations”.
As well as tipping her boyfriend off about the raid, Doherty also shared details about a fight in which another male had smashed a window.
Fitzhugh looked up incidents in spring 2024, out of what the judge called “idle curiosity”.
The two women, who met while both working at McDonald’s, sat apart in the dock and were accompanied in court by their families.
Judge Spencer speculated that maybe their “friendship has not survived this case” and said “I have little doubt that it will haunt you for the rest of your days”.
He said: “It’s impossible to recognise the young women who I read about, with such positive qualities, in the women who committed these offences.”
Both women were charged in April after an investigation led by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) after conduct referrals.