Met PC wins £500,000 to settle race and sex abuse claim

Britain's biggest police force is to pay £500,000 damages to a black police constable who alleged she was repeatedly racially and sexually abused by fellow officers, the Guardian has learned.

The award to PC Joy Hendricks was made by the Metropolitan police to avoid a potentially embarrassing court case. Her five-year ordeal saw her charged and acquitted of assaulting an officer who had racially abused her.

PC Hendricks said her colleagues had given her white face paint, sexually assaulted her, set her uniform alight and directed racist abuse at her.

The bill to the taxpayer is expected to rise as the Met will pay some of her legal costs and possibly other sums as part of a settlement.

The force had tried to have her employment tribunal case thrown out on a technicality, but court after court ruled against them. Ms Hendricks' case was due to be heard in the autumn. The deal was done after protracted talks at the mediation service Acas.

The case is the latest embarrassment to the Met after the force was branded "institutionally racist" by the Macpherson inquiry investigating its behaviour over the death of Stephen Lawrence. It is currently facing an investigation chaired by the former union leader Bill Morris, and one by the Commission for Racial Equality.

In 1999 PC Hendricks was cleared of punching a fellow officer after telling a court that she had acted in self-defence after suffering racial abuse.

At the time she said: "The sergeant described me as dodgy [police slang for corrupt] as I passed him in the canteen and then in the pool room he called me 'Stevie Lawrence number two'.

"When I asked him to apologise he approached me with a snooker cue and then I hit him with a closed fist in self-defence. In court he said I had violently assaulted him. This was just another, albeit more serious, incident of abuse. It was the final straw that broke the back."

Her trial before Horseferry Road magistrates heard that colleagues had directed racist taunts at her after she joined the Met in 1987. Officers called her "groid", short for negroid, and also "bif", short for "black ignorant fucker".

Magistrate Eleri Rees took only five minutes to rule that there was no case to answer and said: "It is for the prosecution to make me sure that she was not acting in self-defence and they have failed to do so."

Since her acquittal in 1999 PC Hendricks, 38, has been off work because of ill health. She has lived on £52-a-week welfare benefits since the force stopped her sick pay.

She was based at Islington police station in north London from 1989 to 1994, and says she suffered "five years of systematic victimisation".

On one occasion she said she was given white face paint, with a colleague saying it was because she "behaved as if I was white". She also claimed she had been sexually assaulted after a night out with colleagues, had her uniform set alight and was locked in a room for an hour.

Leroy Logan, chair of the Met Black Police Association, said: "The way in which the case was dragged out was a concern for us. The force could have treated her better."

The Met has made other large payouts to women officers who suffered racial or sexual discrimination.

Sarah Locker was awarded £215,000 in damages in 2000 as part of a £1m settlement after suffering a campaign of racial abuse and harassment. Belinda Sinclair won a total of £500,000 for sexual discrimination.

A spokesman for the Met said: "The case has been settled. It involves the payment of a sum of money to Ms Hendricks without an admission of liability on the part of the Met. An employment tribunal claim has now been withdrawn."

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