PC Jonathon Cobban, 35, and Joel Borders, 45, joked about beating and sexually assaulting women, raping a colleague and using Tasers on children, their trial heard. Another accused who is a serving police officer, P.K. William Neville, was found not guilty of two counts of the same offense with which the others were charged: sending a grossly offensive, obscene, obscene or threatening message over a public electronic communications network. . District Judge Sarah Turnock said WhatsApp, an encrypted social media platform, had been used as a “safe space” where the perpetrators believed they had “free rein” to share the grossly offensive comments. Cobban and Borders faced “a very real” prospect of going to prison, she told them after reading a summary of her verdict at City of London Crown Court. The messages were exchanged between April 5 and August 9, 2019, to a group that included active-duty officers, one of whom was Wayne Couzens. The messages were discovered when Couzens was arrested for the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021. The messages included one in which Neville told others on the team about a recent shift when he had pinned down a 15-year-old girl, referring to it as a “race match,” a remark prosecutors allege was the perpetrator’s rape fantasy. However, Turnock said she was unable to accept that it could be inferred from the message in question that Neville had used unreasonable force and accepted evidence that the term ‘shuggle snuggle’ was an informal term used in police training. It found him and Coban not guilty of one charge related to text messages they had exchanged. Sentencing will take place at Westminster Crown Court in November.
