An ex-police worker has been jailed for over seven years for sexually abusing a young boy.
Bradley Paul Smith, 41, who had also worked as a York bus driver, groomed and bribed the child before sexually assaulting him and forcing him to engage in sexual acts against his will.
Smith, of The Pastures, Dringhouses, told the boy to “keep it a secret” and initially the victim didn’t tell anyone because he felt “ashamed” and an inexplicable sense of guilt, York Crown Court heard.
Anne Richardson, prosecuting, said the former police employee, who had just applied to be a full-time police officer when he was arrested, abused the child at a property in York.
There were multiple occasions when he told the boy to take his clothes off, and the victim did as he was instructed. Smith would then take off his own clothes, perform lewd acts in front of the boy and sexually assault him.
The victim, who can’t be named for legal reasons, told police he didn’t tell anyone at the time because he was “scared and ashamed and just wanted to forget about it”.
He kept quiet about the abuse for about two years until his teachers and a family member noticed he had undergone a “drastic mood change” and he finally made disclosures to police.
After being arrested in January 2020 and quizzed about the boy’s allegations, Smith made vehement denials, claiming they were “absolutely false”.
He was charged with two counts of sexually assaulting the boy, two counts of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and two counts of engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a minor.
He denied all allegations and the case went to trial this week.
The jury found Smith guilty on all six counts on Wednesday following the three-day trial.
‘Catalogue of offending’
Before reaching their verdicts, the jury were told about Smith’s depraved past trawling the internet for “pre-teen porn” and voyeurism.
In March 2020, he was jailed for four years for downloading more than 3,000 sexual photos and videos of children, distributing indecent images, taking an indecent image of a child and eight counts of voyeurism.
Smith, who was working as a speed-camera-van operator with North Yorkshire Police at the time of these offences, had taken covert video footage from inside a men’s changing room at a gym and secretly filmed youngsters in a state of undress between June 2014 and February 2019.
He was arrested for those offences in February 2019, just under a year before his arrest for the offences against the boy in York, and was suspended from police duty. He was subsequently sacked.
Ms Richardson said that Smith’s wicked acts against the boy, while still working for the county police service, were further evidence of his “predatory targeting of young boys”.
Defence barrister Chris Dunn conceded that “this was a catalogue of offending on several different occasions”.
He said that Smith now lived with his elderly parents who relied on him “heavily”.
Judge Simon Hickey said the young boy had clearly been bribed as part of the grooming process and felt “immense guilt, which he should never do… because he was telling the truth”.
He said the evidence made it clear that Smith had abused the boy “many times” and it was also evident that he had an “unhealthy interest in looking at illegal images of youngsters”.
The judge said that Smith had used the “classic” paedophile ploy of telling the child “not to speak out”.
Smith was jailed for seven-and-a-half years, which Mr Hickey said was “the least” sentence he could impose.
He was also made subject to a lifetime sexual-harm prevention order to curb his online activities and contact with children and will remain on the sex-offenders’ register for an indefinite period.