The Metropolitan Police has dismissed Special Chief Officer James Deller without notice following an accelerated misconduct hearing on Friday 9 October. The hearing considered his use of a police-issued work phone on two occasions in July and August 2025. The force has also said it is reviewing the future leadership and structure of the Special Constabulary as part of its ongoing work on professional standards.
Deller was the Chief Officer of the Met’s Special Constabulary. The published account says he used his work phone to photograph images of a sexual nature that were displayed on his personal device. The images had originally been sent to his personal phone through WhatsApp’s View Once function.
According to the account of the hearing, Deller then sent both photographs from his work phone to his personal phone and deleted them. Those are the specific actions set out in the announcement. The hearing was accelerated and resulted in dismissal without notice, the employment and policing outcome recorded by the force for the conduct it considered.
The dismissal carries a further consequence. Deller will be added to the College of Policing barred list and will not be eligible to serve in policing again. The release identifies him by the rank of Special Chief Officer, or SCO, and describes him as the Chief Officer of the Special Constabulary at the time of the decision.
The Met said the matter was uncovered during Project Galatasaray, a week of action using advanced technologies to tackle corruption and professional misconduct in the force. In this case, lawful business monitoring, known as LBM, and Palantir’s Foundry system helped identify the images and other key evidence. The announcement attributes that detection work to those monitoring and evidence tools; the dismissal itself followed the misconduct hearing.
Commander Pete Stevens said Special Constabulary members are volunteers who give up their time to help keep London safe. He said they should be led by people who demonstrate the highest standards in every part of their lives. In his statement on the decision, he said Deller had let down the Special Constabulary and abused the trust placed in him. The force’s published action was dismissal without notice, followed by the barred-list process.
The Special Constabulary is the volunteer component of London policing, and the announcement places the decision at the most senior level of that body. The force has not announced a successor, an interim leadership arrangement or a change to the way volunteers are deployed. It has instead confirmed a review of the future leadership and structure of the Special Constabulary.
That review is an announced piece of work rather than a completed reform. The release says it forms part of ongoing work to improve professional standards, but does not set out its timetable, terms of reference or proposed structural changes. It does, however, make clear that the review is not merely inferred from the dismissal: the force expressly says that it is reviewing leadership and structure.
The published outcome therefore has two concrete elements. The individual process has ended in dismissal without notice and a future bar from policing. Separately, the force is examining how the Special Constabulary should be led and structured. The official account provides the documented conduct, the monitoring programme that identified evidence, the hearing date and the consequences for Deller, while the wider review remains at the stage of an announced professional-standards exercise.
