In March 2014, the UK’s then Home Secretary Theresa May announced an official government inquiry into the conduct of UK undercover policing units. The inquiry was prompted by a string of allegations about unethical and invasive police activity, including revelations that undercover units had spied upon the family and friends of the murdered Black teenager Stephen Lawrence. That inquiry, which is still ongoing, came to be dubbed the Undercover Policing or Spycops scandal, and it revealed an astonishing history of police abuse. In the name of gathering intelligence about so-called “subversion”, undercover officers had infiltrated over 1000 social justice organisations: from feminists, anarchists, and anti-fascists to groups opposing racism and apartheid to those seeking environmental justice and advocating animal rights. On those deployments, the officers went by aliases that they found in national birth and death registers, stealing the identities of children who had died decades before. In those guises, they maneuvered their way into intimate connections, including forming sexual relationships with activist women. Many of those relationships lasted for years; some of them resulted in children whom the men later abandoned. Only in the past decade have those women learned the men’s true identities and discovered the callous indifference with which the so-called “spycops” disregarded their human rights.
Today we hear about that history, and its repercussions, from people who know it from the inside out. Chris Brian spent years in anarchist groups in Bristol and is now a lead researcher in the Undercover Research Group, which was set up in 2010 to document the history of undercover policing as its abuses came to light – an effort that has now resulted in an online database, Spycops Research, that aims to make the materials released in the Undercover Policing Inquiry accessible to all. He’s joined by another core participant in the inquiry, a woman who goes by the name of Jessica. In 1992, when she was a 19-year-old animal rights activist, she had a two-year-long relationship with a man she knew as Andy Davey but who she learned in 2017 was a high-ranking undercover police officer named Andy Coles. She is now a member of Police Spies Out of Lives, a campaigning support group pushing for justice for women targeted by undercover policing, which seeks to expose the sexual and psychological abuse they experienced and the institutional misogyny that underpinned it.
For more information on the history and documents discussed in the interview, Chris and Jessica recommend the following links:
https://www.spycopsresearch.info/analysis/background-and-foundation-sds
https://www.spycopsresearch.info/spycops/hn325-conrad-dixon
https://www.spycopsresearch.info/targets/vietnam-solidarity-campaign-vsc
https://www.spycopsresearch.info/analysis/tradecraft
…plus the three-part BAFTA-nominated ITV documentary The Undercover Police Scandal.