Final word

Abusive spy cops scandal is far from over

A projection by Police Spies Out of Lives on the Royal Courts of Justice in London

Fact file

Harriet Wistrich is director and solicitor of the Centre for Women’s Justice, a legal charity established in 2016 to hold the state to account around violence against women and girls and challenge discrimination against women within the criminal justice system. Visit centrefor womensjustice. org.uk THE scandal of undercover police officers deceiving women into long-term intimate sexual relationships, as described by former school teacher, Alison (see page 35), is a paradigm case of institutionalised sexism within the British police.

I had the privilege of representing Alison, along with seven other women, in a landmark legal case against the Metropolitan Police arising from the outrageous conduct of these undercover police officers.

We brought a civil claim against the police which eventually resulted in a settlement that incorporated a public apology delivered by assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt. This acknowledged that the actions of the five undercover police officers implicated in their claim were, “abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong”.

Prior to this apology, the then Home Secretary announced there would be a public inquiry into undercover policing. This was triggered partly by the publicity surrounding the case, and partly by a whistleblower from within the secret unit revealing that a number of Black justice campaigns had been infiltrated, including the Stephen Lawrence campaign (see pages 32-34).

More than 30 women targeted by spy cops

Following the delivery of the police apology and the commencement of the inquiry, many more women have come forward, having discovered they too were victims of similar deception by undercover police officers. There are now more than 30 women who were targeted in this way over the 40-year period covered by the public inquiry.

Far from being the actions of a few rogue police officers – as suggested at the time the scandal first broke with the exposure of undercover spy Mark Kennedy posing as a climate change activist – it is now unequivocally clear this misconduct was systemic.

Whether or not it was an overt tactic authorised from above, or the outcome of a largely male lockerroom culture where officers were given free rein to use whatever tactics they liked in order to gather intelligence, the impact has been devastating and life-changing for the women affected.

New law will make undercover officers immune

In the meantime, the public inquiry progresses at a snail’s pace. We are more than five years in and have had only one public hearing to date, which has dealt with the first couple of years of the notorious Special Demonstration Squad. All the women affected remain tenacious in their search for the truth and their ambition to hold the police fully to account, despite the toll it takes on them to continue fighting this battle ten years on.

To date, despite the public apology, there is no law sanctioning the use of sex by undercover police officers. In fact, extraordinarily, before the public inquiry concludes, the Government has introduced the Covert Human Intelligence (Criminal Conduct) Bill 2020, which proposes to make criminal conduct by undercover officers immune from prosecution.

We are clearly a very long way away from really learning from such past outrages or seeking to prevent their repetition.

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