A police misconduct hearing has found that an ex officer would have been sacked for "threatening and abusive" behaviour towards his neighbours had he not already been dismissed for unrelated reasons a month earlier.

Amid a feud with his Ilford neighbours, former PC Valmeekee Singh told an Asian woman to "go back to [her] village" and called his neighbouring couple "rodents" in November 2019, heard the misconduct panel last week.

On Monday, July 12, the panel was told Singh was in an “ongoing dispute for a number of years” with his neighbours, who accused him of harassing them, both verbally and on Whatsapp.

Singh, who used to work in the north east borough command unit, accepted his behaviour was “not in keeping” with police standards but argued it was only “misconduct”, as opposed to “gross misconduct”, because he was “provoked”.

During 2019, the hearing heard that Singh sent his neighbour “threatening and abusive” messages over Whatsapp, “negatively referring to him and his family members” and “calling him a coward”.

The panel was told that Singh was also removed from a Whatsapp group for local residents after claiming the couple were “misfits” and “delusional” because he wrongly believed they had reported his Range Rover to the police.

The pair felt Singh’s comments were racial discrimination, despite him also having Asian heritage, because of comments such as “you can’t even speak English properly”, the hearing heard.

However, Singh told the panel he had “received verbal diatribes” and insisted the couple provoked him by refusing to move a camera on their property.

He said: “I do not believe I ever said ‘go back to your own village’ […] if there’s footage of that then I do not remember saying it and, if there’s no footage, then it’s only her word.”