A KENTISH Town police officer has been jailed for two years after pleading guilty to conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

PC Aaron Lloyd Evans-Keady, 26, engineered the release of a woman he had arrested for buying cocaine in Camden.

At Southwark Crown Court on Friday, Judge Higgins said Evans-Keady’s actions were a “gross breach of trust that strikes at the heart of the criminal justice system”.

Prosecutor Sam Brown told the court that Evans-Keady may have held “misguided sympathy” for the woman, who he had described as “not the normal type of slag we normally get in here”.

He was worried about her immigration status and the repercussions for her professional career, the court heard, and was upset that the “real criminals”, the drug dealers, had escaped punishment.

Kieron Cross, a detention officer at Kentish Town who tested the seized drugs, received a 12-month suspended sentence after he agreed to report the test he carried out on three wraps of cocaine as negative. In fact, there were 1.65grams of cocaine and the woman should have received a caution, the court heard.

Cross, 24, from Hertfordshire, later confessed his “colossal error of judgment” to his superiors at the police station in Holmes Road before pleading guilty at the earliest possible opportunity.

But, in what Judge Higgins described as a critical difference, Evans-Keady had tried to “deny any wrongdoing” and to place “sole responsibility” on his former colleague by claiming he did not know the test results were wrong.

He pleaded guilty only the day before a trial was ready to go ahead, a move his barrister, Jennifer Dempster, described as coming from “fear” and the fact that “prison is not an easy place for a police officer”.

She told the court that Evans-Keady had enroll­ed on a counselling course after a difficult first year in the job, adding: “What we find here is someone who was a little naïve. He was not cut out to be a police officer in London, or anywhere.

“He had trauma counselling. He found it difficult to sleep. He has found a new job, something somewhat more mundane, working in customer service as a sales executive for a curtain retailer.”

The court heard that Cross had been on anti-depressants after losing thousands of pounds through a gambling addiction.

Kentish Town sergeant Martin Hubbard, appearing as a character witness for Cross, told the court: “He had lost £25,000 on internet gambling and lost his entire life savings.

He had started to repay his debts and gone to group meetings with Gamblers’ Anonymous.

“He came to me and said he had had a slight relapse, and although barring himself from internet [gambling] websites, he had started going to bookmakers,” Sgt Hubbard said. “We then went to every bookmaker in the area and got him banned.

“I was very disappointed but when I discovered Cross had been completely honest I couldn’t help but have a degree of respect towards him. With every problem he has faced, he has not shirked it.”

Justice Higgins, summing up, told the two defendants: “This is a very serious offence. Such behaviour by a police officer and a civilian employee of the Met Police is deplorable and deeply anti-social. It is a gross breach of trust that strikes at the heart of the criminal justice system.

“It cannot and will not be tolerated. How could the public place trust in the police force if they all behaved as you did?”

He added: “There are two parties to a drug deal, the seller and the buyer. It is an offence that causes misery, heartache, degradation and in some cases death. It is an obscene trade.”

Both accused have resigned from the force, the court heard.