woopsy
Yes, I believe you... by accident you say. Uhu.
A very convenient way to give the police what they want with the minimum fuss and effort.
As an analyst, I often do something a bit like this when responding to a query because the specific question is never complex enough. In order to get to the real truth you often need to ignore a specific brief and try to fathom and understand the true requirement, then answer that instead.
Often the recipient is too stupid to see what you've done and claims you are giving them "too much" or "that isn't what I asked for". Recognising this, then ignoring future requests is often a good way to make then go away.
But I don't do this with sensitive data on "people" (e.g. salary benchmarking). That's just wrong. And if I was tempted, I'd merely present my findings at an anonymised, aggregated level, never the source data.
This smells to me of an intentional act being explained away as a mistake. There was definitely motive. I'd want an independent investigation, and perhaps to consider the prosecution of both parties involved. Prosecution of senior directors. An ombudsman needs to have oversight of this. I can see a junior clerk being sweet talked; "just give us it all if it's a pain to filter it down to the right person" - I've successfully used this tactic myself to obtain pricing data for competitors using the same supplier as me. This is a little bit naughty, admittedly. The police hold a position of extreme trust so if they are grifting like this... Hmmmm...
If the police are abusing their powers we need to strip those powers from them, not give them more. Theresa, are you listening, bitch?