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A convicted sex offender was caught in the police station car park talking into the mobile phone he should not have had.
Kevin Dale had gone to Abingdon police station on September 7 to get specialist ‘risk management’ software installed onto a different smartphone – in compliance with a court-imposed sexual harm prevention order.
But when the police officer came out of the station around an hour later with 49-year-old Dale’s ‘safe’ phone, she found him using another phone that he had not informed Thames Valley Police about, Oxford Crown Court heard.
Dale, who was out of prison on licence at the time, was discovered to have downloaded a number of apps onto the new phone – including Chatiw, which he has previously been jailed for using in breach of the court order.
Prosecutor Cathy Olliver said that, when he was found on the phone, he was talking to a number saved as ‘Mommy1010’.
“Mr Dale admitted instantly he got the phone. He said he was not trying to get sexual access to children. This time, he was talking to women online and, indeed, there were explicit sexual pictures of women he was talking to on the phone,” the prosecutor said.
He claimed to have been given the phone by his painter and decorator employer to take pictures of his finished jobs. But Dale failed to mention to his boss that his court order required his internet-enabled devices to be registered with the police.
Dale, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court earlier this month to breach of the sexual harm prevention order.
He was convicted in 2019 and 2020 for sexual communication with children, sending explicit message via chatroom apps. In 2020, when he was also dealt with for breaching his sexual harm prevention order, he received three years’ imprisonment.
Mitigating, Alice Dodd said that prior to his incarceration on remand, her client had lived at home with his elderly parents. Both relied heavily upon him.
She told the judge: “He knows he has let them down and is worried about how they will cope.”
Dale had struggled with the social isolation that came with his status as a convicted sex offender, the court heard. “He’s found it difficult to make friends because of that. He feels the stigma very heavily.”
Sentencing Dale to two years’ imprisonment, Judge Ian Pringle KC noted that he had been ‘very nervous’ when he was caught with the new phone in the police station car park.
“Rightly so,” he added, “because you’d been using on that phone the same online chat applications that you’d been using both in 2017 [convicted in 2019] and in 2020.
“Clearly, the message hadn’t got home to you at all.”