A Ministry of Defence Police firearms officer has been dismissed without notice after a misconduct hearing found he sent sexual messages and an explicit photograph to a 13-year-old girl.
PC Reece Jones, 32, was found to have committed gross misconduct following an accelerated hearing held remotely on 08-07-2026.
Jones had served with the Ministry of Defence Police since September 2017 and had worked as a firearms officer throughout his career.
The misconduct chair, Assistant Chief Constable Trevor Clark QPM, found Jones’s behaviour was “intentional, deliberate, targeted and planned” and described his communication with the child as sexually predatory.
The case related to messages and photographs sent through Jones’s personal Snapchat account between December 2022 and January 2023.
The girl, referred to as Child A to protect her identity, was 13 at the time.
Jones was accused of asking the girl what she was wearing, requesting photographs of her and sending her an image in which his genitals were partly exposed.
The hearing was told that the girl disclosed her age during the exchange. Jones replied: “You ain’t x” and “Show me you x.”
The misconduct chair found that those replies demonstrated Jones had received and understood the message revealing her age but continued communicating with her.
Jones was arrested by Thames Valley Police on 05-07-2023 on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child.
The criminal case subsequently ended without a conviction. According to the misconduct decision, the Crown Prosecution Service offered no evidence after the girl said she did not want to attend court and was no longer supporting the prosecution.
Police misconduct proceedings apply the civil standard of proof — the balance of probabilities — rather than the criminal standard required to secure a conviction.
During the Thames Valley Police investigation, Jones’s mobile phone was seized and forensically examined.
The Ministry of Defence Police misconduct investigation remained pending while the criminal process took place. Thames Valley Police informed the force in November 2025 that the criminal case had ended before providing further material the following month.
Investigators linked the Snapchat account used during the exchanges to an email address, internet protocol addresses and a mobile number associated with Jones.
Jones accepted that the account, which used the name “michaeljonesy07”, belonged to him. He said he created the username using his middle name, a nickname, and the number from his favourite football shirt because he did not want to disclose his real identity.
He also accepted responsibility for some of the messages and photographs but denied knowingly engaging in sexual communication with somebody he believed was under 16.
Jones said the girl initially told him she was 16 and maintained that he would have ended the conversation immediately had he known she was 13.
He denied sending the explicit image and argued that indicators which could have established whether it had been transmitted from his account were missing from the available Snapchat records.
No explicit photographs or images of children were found on the devices seized from him, the hearing was told.
Jones also disputed the reliability and sequencing of screenshots relied upon by the Ministry of Defence Police Professional Standards Department.
However, the chair rejected his account and concluded that Jones was neither an honest nor credible witness.
ACC Clark said Jones had been vague and equivocal when it suited his case and found that his uncertainty was deliberate rather than the result of a genuine failure to remember what happened.
The decision said Jones initially failed to recognise rooms inside his own home in photographs connected to the case, including his bathroom and bedding.
Publicly available photographs of the property were compared with the backgrounds visible in the images sent through Snapchat.
Jones eventually accepted that it was more likely than not that he was the person shown in photographs taken inside the bathroom.
He continued to deny sending the most explicit image. However, the chair found that the distinctive bedding visible in that photograph was similar, if not identical, to bedding shown in a photograph of Jones’s home.
The language accompanying the image also matched wording used in other messages that Jones admitted sending.
ACC Clark concluded on the balance of probabilities that Jones had sent the photograph and rejected the suggestion that somebody else had been responsible.
The chair found all the factual allegations against Jones proven.
He concluded that Jones asked the girl what she was wearing, requested a photograph of her and sent two photographs of himself taken in his bathroom.
It was also found that he sent the explicit image and continued communicating after the girl disclosed that she was 13.
The decision said the behaviour was predatory irrespective of whether Jones had initially believed the girl was 16, as he claimed.
ACC Clark said: “When he was made aware that she was in fact 13, he continued that same pattern of behaviour and continued to respond to her.”
The conduct breached the professional standards relating to Honesty and Integrity; Authority, Respect and Courtesy; and Discreditable Conduct.
The chair found Jones’s culpability was high and rejected any suggestion that the incident represented a single lapse of judgement.
Instead, he concluded that the conduct was sustained over a period of time and that Jones should have recognised the foreseeable risk of harm.
The girl described the messages as “weird” and unwanted. She stopped communicating with Jones and told her mother what had happened.
ACC Clark found that the girl had suffered actual harm and that Jones’s behaviour had the potential to cause significantly greater harm.
He said Jones had exploited the child’s vulnerability and described the case as gross misconduct “of the utmost seriousness”.
The hearing considered Jones’s previously clean disciplinary record, evidence of his good character and references submitted on his behalf.
Jones also described relationship difficulties, low self-esteem, financial pressure and the effect the investigation had had on his family.
Those factors did not outweigh the seriousness of the conduct.
The chair said the public was entitled to expect that a serving police officer would not engage in sexually inappropriate and predatory communication with a child.
He added that the expectation applied particularly strongly to an officer entrusted with the authority attached to a firearms role.
ACC Clark concluded that public confidence would be undermined if Jones remained in policing after the allegations had been proved.
“A fair-minded member of the public, aware of all the facts I have found proven, would expect nothing less than dismissal to follow,” he said.
Jones was dismissed without notice for gross misconduct.
Ministry of Defence Police
- Stats since 1st January 2022
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62 Misconduct Hearings
82% held in public
