A former police chief widely seen as the architect of new restrictions on press-police relations has urged for a review of reporters being brought to trial, following the acquittal of Sun journalists last week.
Andy Trotter, a former head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said the world has changed since the investigation into newspapers was launched in 2011 following the phone-hacking scandal.
In an interview with the Times, he also said he was troubled by the use of a common law offence of “misconduct in public office” to prosecute officials who may have done something that warranted the sack but maybe not a criminal trial.
“I have had my anxieties for some time about the expanded use of the offence of misconduct in public office,” he said.
“We need to recognise too that the world has changed. I think the press has changed its behaviour and public officials have learned that leaking or selling confidential information is totally unacceptable behaviour.
“In the context of the lessons that have been learned and other pressing demands, I think a review of how we do these things would be timely and appropriate.”
Trotter, who retired in 2014 after 45 years in the police, helped forge media policy for Acpo in the wake of revelations about dinners and drinks between News of the World editors and the Met police chiefs.
He told the Leveson inquiry “that on-the-record briefings from named people as opposed to a regime of tip-offs and leaks” would amount to a “new era of openness and transparency”.
The Metropolitan police investigation, Operation Elveden, was spawned in the wake of the hacking scandal at the News of the World in 2011.
It was fuelled by News International’s decision to hand over millions of internal editorial emails to police revealing payments to hitherto unknown public officials who were paid sources for the Sun and other tabloids.
So far 24 journalists have been brought to trial with just three convictions.
Four senior editors of the Sun – deputy editor Geoff Webster, chief reporter John Kay, executive editor Fergus Shanahan and royal editor Duncan Larcombe – were cleared last Friday of all charges in relation to payments to two public officials.
It is understood some 30 police officers are still on Elveden duties, mainly managing court cases.