Police officer convicted under Data Protection Act

The BBC reports that a police officer has been fined £2,500 by Norwich Magistrates after he extracted information from a police computer (does it mean the Police National Computer?) for a friend. It seems that the friend was the data subject, and the report also suggests that the officer involved had no expectation that what he had done would not be detected - which makes it a particularly silly thing to do, although I am aware that there will be much more to it than this brief report.

Well, at least it shows that the Data protection Act does sometimes get enforced!