Undercover Police Spying Wasn’t Justified, Inquiry Rules

Metropolitan Police officers outside the Houses of Parliament in London on March 21, 2023. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

An inquiry into undercover policing has found that the “great majority” of clandestine operations in the early years of a controversial Metropolitan Police unit were unjustified.

An interim report, published on Thursday, examined the activities of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) that conducted undercover policing activities from 1968–1982. The purpose of the unit was to infiltrate political or single-issue groups to prevent or investigate serious crime, including terrorism, the report said.

The chair of the undercover policing inquiry, Sir John Mitting, said that the great majority of SDS deployments in the examined period didn’t meet the criteria set out by the unit’s purpose.

The inquiry revealed details of intrusion into people’s lives and the relationships that were forged by undercover police officers with members of the public.

“The question is whether or not the end justified the means set out above. I have come to the firm conclusion that, for a unit of a police force, it did not; and that had the use of these means been publicly known at the time, the SDS would have been brought to a rapid end,” Mitting said.

Senior officers within the Metropolitan Police and Home Office officials have failed to address a number of issues, developed as a result of SDS activities, said the inquiry.

This includes the police tactic of long-term deployments into political groups, which resulted in the development of sexual relations, intrusion into people’s lives, and befriending members of target groups.

One of the inquiry witnesses was Eleanor Fairbraida, who had a sexual relationship with undercover officer Mark Kennedy, without knowing his true identity. Kennedy was married and had sexual relations with at least 10 other women while working undercover in the period of 2003–2010.

‘Subversion of Our Democracy’

“These units should never have been there in the first place,” Fairbraida told the PA news agency.

“It’s a subversion of our democracy, we were just trying to make the world a better place. The state covertly surveilling its citizens like it has done, and its thousands and thousands of citizens, not just the people involved in the inquiry, is a real subversion of democracy,” she added.

The inquiry report said that gaining entry to people’s homes while undercover “would generally vitiate the consent which the officer had been given and so might make him or her a trespasser.”

The technique of using the identities of deceased children by police officers without the bereaved relatives’ consent should have been referred to senior Met staff and the Home Office, the inquiry revealed. The technique “would have been bound to have given rise to legitimate public concern and to embarrassment to the Commissioner and to his police authority – the Home Secretary,” said the document.

Responding to the findings, Met Commander Jon Savell acknowledged the distress caused by the undercover policing activities.

“We know that enormous distress has been caused, and I want to take this opportunity to reiterate the apologies made to women deceived by officers into sexual relationships, to the families of deceased children whose identities were used by officers, and to those who suffered a miscarriage of justice because of the actions of SDS officers,” Savell said in a press release.

He added that undercover policing has undergone “radical reform” and bore no relation to how it was conducted in the 1970s.

Members of the Police Spies Out of Lives campaign have criticised the undercover police activity, branding it “unjustified and undemocratic,” and condemned the “misogynistic culture that pervades policing today.”

Set up in 2015, the undercover policing inquiry began hearing evidence in 2020 from political activists, trade unionists, and women deceived into relationships.

The final report is expected to be published in 2026.