Two Police Scotland officers jailed for framing innocent men expose a dangerous failure at the heart of criminal justice
They were supposed to protect the public. Instead, they manufactured evidence, concealed the truth, and sent innocent men towards prosecution.
On a cold February morning at Greenock Sheriff Court, two police officers stood in the dock not as witnesses, but as convicted criminals. PC Kevin Montgomery, 35, and former PC Connor Beggs, 32, had just been sentenced for what the presiding sheriff described as an “abject dereliction of duty and, even worse, an attempt to pervert the course of justice.”
Montgomery was jailed for nine months. Beggs received eight months. Both will now carry criminal convictions that mark the final, irrevocable betrayal of the oath they once swore.
But this case is not simply a story of two rogue officers. It is a case study in how institutional failures at the individual level can corrupt the entire machinery of justice—from the moment of arrest through to prosecution—and how the system designed to hold power to account often fails until the damage is already done.
I. The Investigation That Never Was
The underlying incident took place at an Arnold Clark branch in Greenock in 2021. A domestic assault had been reported. Standard procedure would have dictated a full, thorough, and impartial investigation.
What happened instead was a systematic dismantling of every professional obligation the officers owed to the public, to their force, and to the law itself.
Montgomery and Beggs did not merely cut corners. They actively constructed a false reality.
They failed to notify the police control room they were dealing with a domestic incident—a basic operational requirement that exists to safeguard both officers and victims. They took no proper witness statements. They failed to comply with their own force’s operating procedures. They made no timely record of the alleged offences. And they deliberately omitted to report the actual offenders to the procurator fiscal with the speed the law requires.
But omission was only the beginning.
The pair then entered false information into Police Scotland’s systems. They attempted to conceal the existence of CCTV footage that would have revealed the truth. Montgomery falsified witness statements from a man and a woman involved in the case. And finally, they submitted a report to the procurator fiscal that contained deliberately fabricated information—a report that explicitly and knowingly implicated two innocent men for a crime the officers knew they had not committed.
Two men were set on a path toward prosecution. Two men faced the prospect of conviction, stigma, and punishment—not because of evidence, but because two police officers decided the truth was inconvenient.
II. The Sentence and Its Meaning
Sheriff Tom Ward did not mince words. In sentencing, he described the officers’ conduct as “egregious behaviour” that could only be answered with immediate custody. The defence had sought Community Payback Orders, arguing that prison would destroy their careers and lives. The sheriff was unmoved.
That the officers were professionals, entrusted with coercive state power, was not a mitigating factor. It was the aggravating factor.
When police officers fabricate evidence, they do not simply break the law. They poison the well from which justice must drink.
Every prosecution relies on the integrity of the investigation that precedes it. When that integrity is deliberately corrupted, the entire criminal justice process becomes a vehicle for injustice rather than a remedy against it. The procurator fiscal, the defence, the court—all are rendered instruments of a deception they did not author and cannot detect.
This is why the sentence was custodial. Not merely as punishment, but as declaration: this conduct is incompatible with police power.
III. The Institutional Response: Between Accountability and Damage Limitation
Following the conviction, Police Scotland Chief Superintendent Helen Harrison issued a statement. It read, in part:
“The actions of Montgomery and former officer Beggs go against everything Police Scotland stands for. All officers are bound by our standards of professional behaviour, which apply on and off duty. It is right that policing is held to high standards at all times.”
Beggs had already resigned when he learned a criminal investigation into his conduct had commenced. Montgomery remains a serving officer—for now. His case will now be assessed for misconduct under conduct regulations, a process that is all but certain to result in dismissal.
The statement is textually unobjectionable. It affirms standards, distances the institution from the conduct, and promises internal follow-through. But it also illustrates a recurring tension in police accountability: the institution that failed to detect, prevent, or interrupt the misconduct is the same institution tasked with condemning it after conviction.
Montgomery and Beggs were not acting in isolation. They operated within a system that, for a period of time, accepted their false reports, did not question their missing CCTV evidence, and processed their fabricated witness statements as though they were genuine. The misconduct was not discovered by supervision, audit, or internal oversight. It emerged through means the statement does not specify—but which rarely originate in the institution’s own self-monitoring.
This is not to suggest that Police Scotland condones such conduct. It is to observe that detection of serious police corruption remains heavily reliant on external complaint, whistleblowing, or the sheer weight of evidentiary contradiction. Internal systems did not surface this misconduct. They received it.
IV. The Two Men at the Centre of the Frame
In the coverage of this case, the two innocent men have remained largely invisible. We do not know their names. We do not know how long they remained under suspicion, or whether they were arrested, or whether they obtained legal representation, or how they learned that the case against them had collapsed because the officers investigating them were criminals.
This invisibility is itself a form of secondary victimisation.
When police fabricate evidence, they do not merely attack an abstract concept called “justice.” They attack real human beings—their liberty, their reputation, their psychological safety, their faith in the institutions that exist to protect them. The men framed by Montgomery and Beggs will carry the knowledge that uniformed officers, acting under colour of law, attempted to consign them to conviction. That knowledge does not dissipate when a sentence is read.
It is also worth considering what did not happen. There has been no public statement of apology to the two men from Police Scotland. There has been no announcement of compensation, no formal acknowledgment of the harm done to them specifically. The institution has condemned the conduct in general terms. Whether it has contacted the victims of that conduct remains a matter of public record silence.
V. The Problem of “Bad Apple” Discourse
There is a well-worn vocabulary for cases of this kind. It speaks of “rogue officers,” of “individuals who betrayed their uniform,” of conduct that “goes against everything the force stands for.” This vocabulary is not false, but it is incomplete.
The bad apple metaphor is comforting because it insulates the barrel.
If two officers acted alone, outside the culture and systems of the organisation, then the organisation need only remove them and declare the problem solved. But this framing collapses under scrutiny.
Montgomery and Beggs did not need to recruit accomplices. They did not need to override safeguards or bypass checks. They simply did their jobs as they chose to do them, and the system accepted their output without interruption. No supervisor queried why CCTV evidence was missing. No quality assurance process flagged the contradictory witness statements. No audit identified that a domestic incident report had been handled without basic procedural compliance.
The barrel failed the apples.
This is not to argue that Police Scotland is a corrupt institution. It is to argue that corruption—even isolated corruption—thrives in environments where detection is unlikely and accountability is slow. The misconduct in this case was not sophisticated. It was not a complex conspiracy. It was two officers deciding to lie, and the institution receiving those lies as truth.
That is not a story about two individuals. It is a story about a system that did not see what was in front of it.
VI. The Architecture of Accountability
The conviction of Montgomery and Beggs demonstrates that criminal accountability for police misconduct is possible. It is, however, exceptionally rare—and when it occurs, it is almost always the result of conduct so egregious and so evidentiary that prosecution becomes unavoidable.
This creates a perverse incentive structure.
For an officer contemplating misconduct short of outright fabrication, the realistic risk of criminal sanction approaches zero. Internal misconduct proceedings are non-public,缓慢, and result in sanctions that do not follow the officer into civilian life. Dismissal is the most severe outcome; criminal conviction is vanishingly unlikely.
This is not an argument for mass prosecution of police officers. It is an argument for honest recognition that the current architecture of police accountability relies almost entirely on the conscience of the individual officer—and conscience, as this case demonstrates, is not always sufficient.
Sheriff Ward’s custodial sentence was a rare judicial assertion that police officers who abuse their power will face the same penal consequences as any other citizen who perverts the course of justice. But sentencing occurs at the end of a long chain. It does not address the structural conditions that allowed the misconduct to occur, to remain undetected, and to harm innocent people before it was interrupted.
VII. Conclusion: What This Case Should Demand
The jailing of Connor Beggs and Kevin Montgomery is not a resolution. It is an indictment.
It indicts the two officers who chose to betray their oath and weaponise their authority against innocent men.
But it also indicts, more quietly, a system that could not detect or prevent that betrayal until it was complete.
Police Scotland’s statement affirms that policing must be “held to high standards at all times.” That affirmation is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Standards are not self-executing. They require mechanisms of detection, independent oversight, and meaningful consequence that operate before innocent members of the public are set upon the path toward conviction.
The two men framed by Montgomery and Beggs have not been named. They have not been publicly acknowledged. They have not, so far as the public record shows, received apology or redress. They remain invisible casualties of a misconduct case that has been formally closed.
But the case is not closed. Not for them. And not for the institution that failed them.
Every police misconduct case that reaches conviction is a double failure: first, the failure of the officer; second, the failure of the system to stop them.
We attend to the first failure with criminal sanctions. We must learn to attend to the second with institutional reform, independent oversight, and an unflinching willingness to ask not only who betrayed the public trust, but what in the architecture of policing made that betrayal so easy to commit and so hard to detect.
Until we ask both questions, we will continue to sentence the officers and overlook the system that enabled them.
And the next two innocent men, already unknown, will wait to be framed by the next two officers who decide that the truth is optional.
If you have information about police misconduct or wish to report concerns regarding an officer, contact the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner (PIRC) or your national police oversight body. Independent oversight is the only accountability mechanism not controlled by the institution being overseen.
