John Yates QPM (born 17 February 1959[1]) is a former Assistant Commissioner in the London Metropolitan Police Service (2006–2011).
[1] Yates was also the Met Police's senior officer who travelled to Brazil to meet the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, who had been shot dead after being mistaken for a terrorist in the immediate aftermath of the London Bombings in July 2005.
[2] Yates' promotion to Assistant Commissioner was confirmed by the Metropolitan Police Authority on 18 December 2006; he had previously held the position on a temporary basis.
[3] In March 2009, Yates was assigned to investigate allegations of torture made against UK anti-terrorism officials and on 9 April 2009, it was announced that he would replace Bob Quick as head of Specialist Operations.
Yates's team handed its main file on the cash for peerages inquiry to the Crown Prosecution Service on Friday 20 April 2007.
[9] On 20 July 2007, the CPS announced that no charges would be brought as a result of the investigation for lack of direct evidence of an agreement that would have violated the law forbidding the sale of honours.
[10] In mid-2009, Yates conducted a review of the 2006 Police inquiry into the News of the World royal phone hacking scandal, which had led to the imprisonment of two men in January 2007.
In a later public statement, and in a July 2009 appearance at the Home Affairs Select Committee, he announced of the initial investigation that he "found it to be satisfactory".
[11] Yates then passed his findings back to the Commissioner and agreed with lawyers and the head of the Crown Prosecution Service Keir Starmer that no further action need be taken, and the case was not reopened.
"[15] In 2011, dramatic developments in the scandal led to the closure of the News of the World newspaper, Yates faced allegations of wrongdoing, including from MP Chris Bryant, who called for his resignation saying "a very dirty smell" surrounded the police's conduct in the matter.
[17] Yates later said that he believed that he should refer only to cases where voicemail messages had been shown to have been intercepted prior to them being heard by the intended recipient.
[22] In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph published on 9 July 2011, Yates expressed "extreme regret" for the failings in the initial phone hacking inquiry but dismissed any suggestion of corruption or improper relationships on his part.
This was notwithstanding the fact that a vast amount of documentation available from the August 2006 seizures had not been fully analysed by the MPS itself; very little of it had been considered (let alone reviewed) by the CPS, save only for the very limited exercise of disclosure of unused material.
[27] Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said Bahrain's authorities had failed to investigate the involvement of high-ranking officials in "rampant torture or unlawful killings".
[31][32] The day after his comments, a child was admitted to intensive care after being shot in the chest by anti-riot police firing live ammunition and tear gas during a funeral procession for an activist killed the previous month.
[31] Despite a man being beaten to death by police on the eve of the Grand Prix[35] and the arrests of Japanese and Western journalists (their Bahraini associates were also badly beaten),[36] the day after the race, Yates had an article in The Daily Telegraph in which he claimed that Bahrain was "bewildered by the world's hostility" and said the country "is not Syria".