'SOFTLY SOFTLY' POLICE CHIEF TO QUIT THE FORCE A YEAR EARLY

Brian Paddick, Britain's most senior openly gay police officer, has
announced that he is quitting, a year earlier than expected.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Paddick has recently been caught up in
a dispute over the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by armed police
at Stockwell tube station, south London, in July 2005. Comments he
made to the Independent Police Complaints Commission contradicted the
version of events given by the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair.

But a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Authority denied that Mr
Paddick had been given "gardening leave", and said that his early
departure was "not unusual". He added: "He does not have to give
reasons and we do not seek them."

Mr Paddick, who joined the Metropolitan Police in 1976, when he was
18, will leave his UKP131,000-a-year post on 31 May, without having
to work through the normal three-month notice period. His term of
office was due to end in November 2008. It is now thought that he
will write about a book about his police career, which was frequently
a source of controversy.

In July 2001, as police commander in Lambeth, he pioneered a new
approach to enforcing the cannabis laws, under which people caught
with a small quantity of the drug were let off with a warning rather
than being arrested or cautioned.

Critics accused him of turning Brixton into a magnet for "drug
tourism", a claim he vigorously contested. He claimed that when drugs
were so easily found anywhere in the UK, there was no motive for
anyone to travel to Brixton to find them. In the six months from
September 2001 to April 2002, during his tenure, robberies fell by 50
per cent in Lambeth, the highest drop anywhere in the UK.

But he ran into trouble when he was identified as the blogger who
styled himself "Brian: the Commander" in an anarchist chat room, and
who wrote that "the concept of anarchism has always appealed to me".
That earned him a ticking off from his superiors, but no disciplinary action.

Almost at once, Mr Paddick was targeted by tabloid newspapers, who
paid his former lover, James Renolleau, UKP100,000 for details of his
private life. He was quoted as saying that Mr Paddick had taken
cannabis "hundreds of times", that he had kept a stash of the drug at
home "in a cubby hole next to the chimney", and that he had lived a
reckless, promiscuous, gay lifestyle.

Mr Paddick acknowledged that he and Mr Renolleau had been long-term
lovers, and that Mr Renolleau was a cannabis user, but denied all the
other allegations. But they led to him being removed from his post in
Lambeth. He made an unexpected comeback in November 2003, when he
made acting deputy assistant commissioner.

During the inquiry into the shooting of de Menezes, a Brazilian who
was mistaken for a suicide bomber, Mr Paddick told investigators that
officers in Sir Ian Blair's office feared that an innocent man had
been killed hours after the shooting. Sir Ian has maintained that
they realised their mistake the following morning.

A police spokesman said: "He has already got more than 30 years'
service and so he can retire on a full pension. He requested to go
before the end of his fixed term appointment and asked that the MPA
waive the three-month notice period, which we agreed to do.