I have reason to believe a serving Police officer has recently checked me out via the PNC, using my car registration and for improper reasons ie nothing relating to a crime/crime prevention and simply to see where I live and if I have any previous convictions etc.

Is there anyway I can verify this ie via an FOI request and are there any penalties for mis-use/can Jo-public realistically do anything in such an instance?

Make a complaint?

What makes you think that? Did you forget to wear your tin foil hat one day?

Dating a copper’s daughter are we?

contact the professional standards team on your force.

Mate had a row with a woman in a local village over a right of way ona singletrack road and got a call from her husband later who was a sergeant in the local force and had accessed his details via the PNC. A complaint was made and it didn’t go well for the officer.

Did you;

refuse him pudding?
park in from of his house?
sneer when he said he didn’t know how to extract a blind bearing?
ask him to stop using the mobile phone while driving?
mention that the water in his cock beaker needed changing?
poo on his stairs?

From previous work experience with the PNC, its use is heavily controlled, and attracts severe penalties for mis-use (although this was from a public body perspective, not the Police directly).

Every use of the PNC is logged, so it should be relatively straight forward to work out who has used it and for why. For this reason I would make a complaint in the first place. You would also probably be looking to make a subject access request (SAR) under the data protection act rather than an FOI.

As above, I wouldn’t thought any serving copper would be stupid enough to use PNC for personal reasons. Contact the complaints dept of the force involved if you want to take it further.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8713194/Hundreds-of-police-officers-caught-illegally-accessing-criminal-records-computer.html

I stand corrected for my over-estimation of IQ among the general constabulary.

Yep, being human is the usual flaw.

I have relatives who are coppers and it’s commonly joked that they have checked out prospective partners for their daughters or sisters, might have been more prevalent in days gone by. Stopping a car with a broken brake light out you could ask for a pnc check for example, which might then come to nothing and since the surname is different than the serving officer no-ones likely to suspect.

The police force will have a data protection department who will not be pleased if that is true.
Make a formal complaint

You would also probably be looking to make a subject access request (SAR) under the data protection act rather than an FOI.

I think a SAR would tell you what data they hold about you, don’t know if that would necessarily include who’s accessed that data.

Stopping a car with a broken brake light out you could ask for a pnc check for example, which might then come to nothing and since the surname is different than the serving officer no-ones likely to suspect.

Presumably there has to be a data trail for the stop itself matching the pnc check? It’s not so much that you’ll get nobbled automatically, more just that there is no way to disguise it if the ‘target’ of the search twigs that something has happened.

As has been said PNC use is very strictly audited, I’m surprised these days an officer would risk using it for personal reasons (other than for monetary gain which is always going to be a risk, however small).
Not actually sure who you complain to though…