April 2018 Former Hertfordshire police officer jailed A disgraced former police officer who sexually abused two young girls over a period of four years has been jailed. A judge accused Garry Wells-Burr – who was a constable in Stevenage and East Herts from 2003 to 2016 – of betraying all he had trained for as he sentenced him to six years behind bars. Wells-Burr targeted the two girls between January 2010 and July 2014, abusing one of them between the ages of 12 and 16. His second victim was aged 15. Passing sentence on Friday at Chelmsford Crown Court, Judge David Turner QC told him: “Your grave misconduct left your victims shattered and confused, and their victim impact statements were painful reading. “The wickedness of what you have done will have a lasting and damaging impact on both of them. You were a trusted individual and you breached that trust with your covertly manipulative and shameful abuse of power. “You targeted two relatively young children and the abuse was repeated and sustained. This was a betrayal of everything you had trained for and believed in.” Wells-Burr pleaded guilty to causing or inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity, causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, and sexual assault. He denied a count sexual assault of a child under 13 and two counts of sexual assault, all three of which have been ordered to lie on file. In addition to the jail sentence, Wells-Burr was made subject to a sexual harm prevention order prohibiting him from contacting either victim or having any unsupervised contact with children under 16. He will be on the sex offenders register for life. Wells-Burr – of Needingworth in Cambridgeshire, and formerly of Royston – was arrested while on duty in January 2015 after officers in the Joint Child Protection Investigation Team received an allegation that he had sexually assaulted two young girls. He was immediately suspended from duty and never returned to work. He was subsequently dismissed from the force for gross misconduct in February 2016 over an unrelated matter. Wells-Burr was based at Stevenage, Bishop’s Stortford and Hertford police stations during his time with Herts police, working as an intervention/response officer and case investigation officer.