A ROYAL police officer has avoided jail after stealing a dead woman’s pictures to pose online as a 17-year-old girl “for kicks”.

PC Adam Cox, 31, of Windsor, was working in Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection when he created an alter ego called Emily Whitehouse to exchange explicit chat with three men online.

After being asked to send them revealing photographs, Cox found indecent images online of a Canadian woman who committed suicide at the age of 21 and passed them off as “Emily”.

Police investigating the online chat raided his home last year, and uncovered a stash of 1,691 indecent and extreme images, with one featuring an infant and others showing children as young as seven.

Cox has now been made subject to a sexual harm prevention order and sacked following a misconduct review by the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS).

Assistant Commissioner Helen Ball said: “It is particularly sad and unacceptable that an officer in PC Cox’s trusted position would behave in such a discreditable way.

“He was in possession of a very large number of images of young children. Any conviction is discreditable, one of this nature where the behaviour has meant the abuse of the vulnerable is deeply so.

“Dismissal without notice is the appropriate sanction.”

On his Emily persona, Cox had said: “It’s madness, a way of escaping reality.”

He pleaded guilty to four counts of possession of indecent images – 645 of the most serious category A pictures, 201 category B, 449 category C, and 396 extreme pornographic images of bestiality. He denied encouraging three men to attempt to get indecent images from “Emily” and the charges were ordered to lie on file.

The Old Bailey heard it was impossible for police to establish if the dead woman in the Emily pictures was 16, 17 or 18 when they were taken.

Judge Mark Dennis QC sentenced Cox to 20 months in prison suspended for two years and 250 hours of unpaid work.

Mitigating, Nick Yeo, said: “He is a man who finds it extremely difficult to articulate his motivation and one can quite understand that because the context is extremely unusual conduct, one might think.”