BY BEN O’ROURKE
Position vacant? UK wildlife cop’s job on the line after following RSPB’s persecution playbook. Steven Irvine has had ups and downs throughout his police career. But his latest mistake may just end it.
Steven Irvine, one-time ‘golden boy’ at the UK’s National Wildlife Crime Unit, has fallen from grace after manufacturing the prosecution of a falcon breeder.
A couple of years ago, Irvine was the toast of Police Scotland for busting a pair of alleged falcon thieves using DNA tests. In February 2024, father and son Timothy and Lewis Hall were handed community service sentences and banned from keeping birds of prey for five years.
The case was held up by Defra as proof that breeders were stealing wild birds and passing them off as captive bred in the lucrative raptor market.
NWCU head Kevin Lacks Kelly was so impressed with Irvine, that even before the case of the Halls was over, he’d recruited him. “This is part of the largest wildlife crime investigation in UK history,” gushed Kelly, adding that it showed “the illegal wildlife trade is a thriving business for criminals”.
In reality, it is far from rampant – involving an extreme minority – and does not justify the government pumping large amounts of public money into hounding breeders for years without any evidence they were guilty of anything.
While at Police Scotland, Irvine reached the lofty-sounding rank of head of armed policing and was often quoted in dramatic news stories involving guns, drugs and organised crime.
However, he was moved to the less-impressive role of ‘wildlife crime co-ordinator’ after an email leaked to the press revealed his plan to save the force cash by pulling Scotland’s firearms officers out of the UK’s anti-terrorism network. The Scottish Sun newspaper ridiculed the idea, as it came during a ‘severe’ threat level.
Irvine’s subsequent news items were less dramatic, such as coverage of Operation Wingspan – a crackdown on the endangered species trade that saw officers trawling charity shops in East Lothian for contraband clothes. A publicity shot of him and another policeman posing by fur coats they’d seized is magnificently unimpressive, although it may have excited their girlfriends.
But after the Halls were busted, Irvine was bouncing back. In a BBC News report, he makes the extremely unlikely claim that if the two men weren’t stopped, “it would likely have wiped out the peregrine population in the south of Scotland”.
In a press release, Detective Superintendent Bryan Burns said: “This case has been a monumental effort by Detective Constable Steven Irvine who led the investigation and was determined to bring the perpetrators to justice, going into meticulous detail to unravel the true extent of the criminality involved.”
However, Irvine’s obsessive approach is worryingly similar to the tactics of Guy Shorrock, former senior investigator at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Shorrock developed an ‘outcome fixation’, which led to extensive malpractice and is the focus of my damning 2026 report RSPB Uncovered: The Missing ‘Birdcrime’ Files.
A particularly alarming revelation in that report is Shorrock’s opinion that anyone keeping or breeding birds should be ‘shut down’ and that persecution orchestrated by him was justified, even when it led to innocent people thrown in prison or slapped with criminal records.
Irvine appears to be channelling Shorrock, by adopting the mantle of ‘chief persecutor’ in the case against Russell Hancock, a peregrine falcon breeder.
Hancock’s nightmare began with a July 2024 search by Derbyshire Police of his breeding premises. Led by Irvine, it was based on unsubstantiated claims Hancock was involved in the illegal theft and trade of wild falcons. No evidence was found, but there were minor paperwork discrepancies, which the defence argued were simple clerical errors.
Originally, the Crown Prosecution Service brought several charges against him, including possession of unregistered birds, but scrapped all of them because there was no evidence. The remaining charge was amended to an indictable offence, which Hancock’s lawyers argued was an attempt to “throw mud and see what sticks” after the initial investigation failed.
The ‘mud’ tactic was a favourite of Shorrock, who regularly sought search warrants by deceiving police officers, then changed charges after stumbling across something he insisted was ‘suspicious’, but not mentioned in the warrant.
On Friday 8th May, 2026, a judge at Derby Crown Court threw out the case against Hancock, who the NWCU and CPS had accused of knowingly or recklessly providing false information when registering two birds. Hancock recorded their hatch dates as 2024 instead of 2023. The defence applied for dismissal after the prosecution’s evidence failed to prove “knowledge” or “recklessness”.
It also slammed the prosecution for abuse of process by ignoring the established procedures of Defra and the Animal and Plant Health Agency when dealing with such issues. Their policies suggest that minor administrative breaches by people with no previous convictions should be handled with letters or warnings and not expensive criminal prosecutions.
“Their own policy for any of these type of errors is, number one, a threatening letter, number two, a police caution, number three, prosecution,” says Hancock. “But in my case, they’ve gone straight to number three.”
Throughout the case, there were delays, cancellations and postponements of court appearances. This prolonged the “torture”, as Hancock calls it, by stretching the case past crucial breeding deadlines, costing him hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost revenue.
Hancock forked out more money for independent DNA tests to prove the birds were all captive bred, something Irvine appears to have taken the wrong way.
“He actually rung me up at 3:30 one afternoon,” says Hancock. “To be fair, he sounded drunk and… asked me if I’d been spreading rumours that his DNA [test results] are incorrect.”
He’s not the only one who has lost money, as Irvine’s two-year investigation and court case will have cost a few hundred thousand quid.
At a hearing in January 2026, the judge questioned the prosecution’s motives. “You’ve raided his premises, you’ve checked 50 peregrine falcons and two of them have the wrong paperwork,” says Hancock, quoting the judge. “Can you explain to me how this is in the public’s interest?”
Irvine appears to be the one pushing the case along, despite his own prosecutor agreeing with the judge’s observation, that the case wasn’t benefitting the public one bit.
It’s believed Kelly has already had Irvine escorted from NWCU headquarters by security guards, or at least emailed him the meeting ID. However, the specialist force’s relevance has been in question since Kelly took over and only a purge by him of RSPB-type influencers can prevent more damage to the NWCU’s credibility and impartiality.
If you or anyone you know has been persecuted by the RSPB or members of the NWCU in the same way Russell Hancock was, then please get in touch.
Ben O’Rourke worked as Assistant International Editor of the South China Morning Post and as a journalist for Fieldsports Britain. Ben now works as a freelance journalist and investigator. His Substack can be found here.