Something has been seriously wrong with undercover policing in this country for a long time. Last year we learned that covert officers had used secret identities to forge intimate relationships with women connected to or involved in protest groups. These fake relationships have ruined lives and left children fatherless. Don’t like the idea of your phone being hacked? Imagine how these women must have felt on learning their lovers were actually police spies. There is nothing to suggest that the forming of such relationships was not encouraged from above. These women’s lives were clearly beneath the contempt of those making the call. State-sanctioned abuse indeed.
Such skewed priorities and grievous invasions of private lives amount to serious human rights violations. The Met Police must now come clean and co-operate with the public to find out how far officers were prepared to go, and at what cost. We need to have an open, honest debate about what we as a society are prepared to accept for the sake of police intelligence. Undercover policing is a vital tool, but there must be limits. A judge has to sign off a warrant to search your premises, so why on earth should police be able to self-authorise the far greater intrusion of placing a mole amongst your colleagues and friends?
We note that the Met Police’s high command remarked yesterday that it will be for this generation of police leaders to account for the actions of their predecessors. This will only be possible if the issue is given long-overdue and properly independent scrutiny. Nothing short of a judge-led inquiry into allegations of a smear campaign against the Lawrence family will suffice.
