Isaac Keown
Introduction
Isaac Keown is a former police constable with the City of London Police who was dismissed without notice in July 2026 after a misconduct panel found that he copied bodycam footage of a vulnerable woman onto his personal phone and sent it to his cousin, a serving officer with another force. The panel found his actions were “deliberate, informed” and carried out despite his knowing they were wrong, and that his recording, retention and disclosure of the footage amounted to an “exceptionally serious abuse of trust”. He was dismissed without notice and placed on the police barred list, the mechanism that prevents a former officer from serving in any force.
Background Information
Keown served as a police constable with the City of London Police, the force responsible for policing the Square Mile. Little else about his career or background has been published; the public record of his case is built around a single call. On 29 August 2023 he attended a domestic incident during which a vulnerable woman grabbed a knife, seemingly intending to harm herself. He disarmed her, and the encounter was captured on his body-worn camera — footage that belonged on the force’s system and nowhere else.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Instead of leaving the footage on the force system, Keown recorded part of it onto his personal phone without authority and with no policing purpose. He retained the clip, and later sent it privately through Instagram to his cousin, PC Treadwell, an officer with Gloucestershire Constabulary. PC Treadwell later shared the footage electronically with other officers. When the chain of distribution came to light, the matter went before a misconduct panel.
The panel found that Keown’s access, recording, retention and disclosure of the footage were an “exceptionally serious abuse of trust” which “strikes at the heart of the standards expected of police officers”, and that his actions were “deliberate, informed” and carried out despite his knowing they were wrong. The proven breaches were of the standards of Confidentiality and Discreditable Conduct, both of which he admitted. What he disputed was the categorisation: he argued that his behaviour amounted to misconduct rather than gross misconduct.
In his defence, Keown told the hearing that the August 2023 incident had left him “shell shocked”, that it was the first time he had encountered a member of the public with a weapon, and that no one debriefed him afterwards. He said he sent the footage to “open her eyes to the challenges officers faced”, and that he had recorded it because the police station was busy and he did not want to keep accessing his body-worn camera recording. The panel did not accept that these explanations reduced his culpability to ordinary misconduct.
The panel also had before it a psychiatry report dated 4 June 2026, which found his presentation “was consistent with trauma and stressor-related difficulties arising from the index incident, with features suggestive of unresolved trauma”, but found no severe mental disorder impairing his reality testing at the time. At an interview under misconduct caution in November 2025 he accepted inconsistencies in his evidence. The panel had regard to his character and to positive statements made about him, but raised concerns about his inability to explain some of his decisions.
One allegation was not made out: the claim that he shared the footage to “show off” was not proven.
Public Reaction and Consequences
The outcome of the hearing, dated 29 July 2026, was dismissal without notice, and Keown was placed on the police barred list. The panel’s report was published by the force. Detective Superintendent Thomas Hill, Head of Professional Standards at City of London Police, said Keown “compromised the integrity of policing and trust the public place in us”, adding that he has been prevented from working in the industry again.
The dismissal was reported by the Evening Standard and catalogued by the police-misconduct tracker Misconduct999, whose account stresses how the footage travelled: recorded on a personal phone, sent through a private Instagram message, then forwarded electronically to other officers by the cousin who received it. The case drew no reported public statement from Keown beyond his evidence to the panel, and the woman at the centre of the footage has not been named in any account.
Current Status
Keown is a former police constable, dismissed without notice on the outcome dated 29 July 2026 and placed on the police barred list, which removes any route back into a warrant card in England and Wales. The barred-list placement prevents him from working in policing or joining another force, consistent with the professional standards head’s statement that he has been prevented from working in the industry again. The panel’s published report remains the public account of what he did and why the panel judged it gross misconduct.
Impact on Their Career/Life
The dismissal ended Keown’s police career over footage that should never have left the force’s systems. The panel’s findings make the lesson explicit: recording sensitive material onto a personal device, keeping it, and passing it on — even within family, even to a fellow officer — is an abuse of trust that policing will treat as gross misconduct. His trauma-based mitigation did not downgrade the finding, because the psychiatry report located his difficulties in the incident itself without excusing what he did with its record, and his barred-list status forecloses any return to the profession.