A police administrator has been jailed for almost three years after leaking confidential information to her drug dealer boyfriend.
Lucy Langmead, 44, started a relationship with 37-year-old Daniel Cozens in 2020 while working for South Wales Police, and began providing him with police intelligence.
Langmead, who is pregnant with her fourth child, accessed the police computer system numerous times to obtain information on Cozens, his family and friends, and also to satisfy her own “morbid curiosity” about cases in the news.
At Cardiff Crown Court on Tuesday, Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke, the Recorder of Cardiff, handed Langmead and Cozens sentences of two years and 11 months and one year and eight months respectively.
A police investigation was launched after a community support officer was approached while on foot patrol in Pontypridd in 2021 by a woman who Langmead had informed of an investigation into her boyfriend.
The court heard the woman told the officer she thought they were looking into him because “I have a friend who works in the courts, and she told me he was being watched”.
The woman and her boyfriend later approached another officer, questioned the number of police patrols, and mentioned information that could only have been obtained from the police systems.
Langmead, from Tonteg, Pontypridd, and Cozens, from Treforest, pleaded guilty to a series of offences, including conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office between May 23 2021 and February 25 2022.
The judge said that throughout training and every time the system is accessed, users are warned about misuse, with every access logged.
Addressing Langmead, the judge said: “From the outset you knew you were committing criminal offences and appeared to do so partly from idle curiosity and partly to elevate your status – in other words you were showing off – including to offenders.
“This was a very serious breach of trust that is placed in police employees.
“You have, by your actions, done serious harm to policing and the public interest.”
She said Cozens’s offending was “significantly less serious” because he did not work for the police.
The judge said there had been “no financial reward” for either of them, but it had put them in “good standing” among offenders they were assisting, with one disposing of drugs he was dealing after a tip-off.
Langmead had also accessed records to satisfy her curiosity, including the case of Logan Mwangi, a five-year-old whose body was discovered in a river near his home in Sarn.
“Logan Mwangi was a five-year-old child who had been murdered and whose body had, at that time, recently been found in a river,” Judge Lloyd-Clarke said.
“There was a lot of publicity around his death, and you could only have been continuing to access the file to satisfy your own morbid curiosity.”
Langmead pleaded guilty to 13 offences of securing unauthorised access to computer material and five offences of unlawful disclosure of personal data.
Cozens pleaded guilty to being concerned in the supply of a controlled drug of class C (Benzodiazepines), being concerned in the supply of a controlled drug of class C (Pregablins) and possession of a controlled drug of class B (cannabis).
Both will serve up to half their sentences in prison, with the rest on licence.
Langmead resigned from South Wales Police in May 2022.
Chief Superintendent Bella Rees, head of professional standards at South Wales Police, said: “Police officers and staff have access to personal and private information and it is both a public expectation and a legal requirement that information should be treated in the strictest confidence, properly protected and used for legitimate policing purposes only.
“Accessing confidential police information without a legitimate policing purpose is an abuse of position and, as this case demonstrates, will be treated robustly.”
John Griffiths of the Crown Prosecution Service said: “Lucy Langmead had the complete trust of her employer in having access to sensitive information and she betrayed that trust.
“Her actions could have placed criminal investigations at risk.
“Daniel Cozens used his relationship with Langmead to try to gain an advantage over the police in his criminal behaviour.
“However, the audit trail from the police computer systems led investigators to them, and together with other evidence allowed the Crown Prosecution Service to present a strong case to the court and ensure these defendants were brought to justice.”
