Kerre Woodham: Give cops benefit of the doubt over email sex images

Before we get too carried away with righteous indignation about coppers, male and female, sitting on their bums, ignoring 111 calls as they salivate over salacious images of vulnerable young women and young men with anatomically improbable body parts, a note of caution. As most of us know, not everybody asks for these images to appear on their computer screens.

Speaking personally, the last thing I feel like seeing first thing in the morning is a technicolour whopper filling the monitor. And yet sometimes, if the caffeine hasn't kicked in and I click "open" instead of "delete", that's exactly what happens. Only once or twice, but lordy, that's more than enough for any girl.

I know a number of perfectly respectable women, in their 50s, who were absolutely appalled to discover during a company audit that they were harbouring offensive images on their computers. They had never downloaded porn in their lives but somehow these images had sneakily infiltrated their files and just sat there, lurking, waiting to be discovered.

Despite the fact that their explanations and protestations of innocence were accepted by their employers, these poor women are still shaken by the experience and they'll never truly trust their computers again.

As I understand it too, a number of the files discovered in police emails were in the deleted file, unopened, and most of the images were of the Benny Hill "cor blimey, did you ever" school of pornography.

As Police Commissioner Rob Robinson pointed out, there were some cops who had very dodgy stuff indeed tucked away in their files and there may well be criminal charges laid against them. Which is great. Root out the bad 'uns and let the 9600 cops who had absolutely clean files get on with their jobs.