UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

One officer was recorded pressing the 'I' key more than 16,000 times

Police in the United Kingdom appear to be taking a cue from Homer Simpson's playbook, with officers in multiple departments accused of "key jamming" to make it look like they were working from home when they likely weren't. 

While there was no mention in reports from Greater Manchester Police or the Durham Constabulary indicating whether dippy birds were involved, both departments noted that their officers appear to have been using something to hold keys down on their department-issued machines while working from home. 

The department had installed keylogging software on the machines to make sure they were only being used for official purposes. According to Greater Manchester Police Deputy Chief Constable Terry Woods, 26 police officers, staff and contractors allowed to work from home were served misconduct papers after GMP's investigation identified "abnormal keystroke behavior" on those devices.

"The abnormal keystroke behaviour comes from repeated key presses and could be from an item left on a keypad, pressing down one key," Woods said in a statement. "Our communities deserve to see value for money and where deliberate behaviour is proven you can be confident, we will take decisive action in this matter."

The GMP has now revoked work-from-home privileges for the entire department, it said. 

The GMP didn't mention whether anyone was being terminated or disciplined for their key jamming habit and didn't respond to questions, but a hundred miles away in Durham, Detective Constable Niall Thubron's key jamming earned him an entry on the College of Policing’s barred list of individuals barred from future employment in policing (subject to appeal). 

Thubron, who resigned from the department in May prior to the Durham Constabulary taking action against him, was found to have jammed his keyboard to make it look like he was working on 38 occasions over the course of 12 days between December 2024 and January 2025.

"The evidence presented … is overwhelming," a report into Thubron's behavior determined. "The data from [Thubron's] laptop shows lengthy periods when the only activity is single keystrokes," with only the H key pressed about 30 times in one instance, and the I key pressed over 16,000 times in another. According to the report, Thubron was only working at his computer about half the time during his working hours in the period in question. 

While the report determined that Thubron's actions were deliberate and malign, the Constabulary believes "his motivation was laziness rather than additional financial gain."

Thubron's and the Manchester officers' behavior, along with a statement from Woods indicating that the "GMP isn't the first force in the UK to have undertaken an operation such as this," suggests this may be a more widespread problem than we know. 

Let this be a warning to anyone working remotely who plans to sluff off so brazenly: Be sure you're not transmitting evidence to your employer - or maybe just actually do your job. ®