Secrets and lies: untangling the UK ’spy cops’ scandal
▻https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/28/secrets-and-lies-untangling-the-uk-spy-cops-scandal
The police spies initially belonged to the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which was created to control the restive protests of the late 1960s, including those opposed to the war in Vietnam, but continued to monitor protest groups for a further four decades. Known only to a select few at the upper echelons of Scotland Yard, the squad, whose officers often grew beards and long hair ahead of their deployments, adopted the nickname “the hairies”.
As one detective inspector in the SDS said: “We were part of a ‘black operation’ that absolutely no one knew about and only the police had actually agreed that this was all OK.” The SDS was disbanded in 2008 because, according to one senior officer, the officers had “lost their moral compass”.
Yet the techniques of highly intrusive, long-term infiltration of protest groups continued in the unit to which Kennedy belonged: the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).
The scale of both spying operations was remarkable: over more than four decades, at least 139 police officers were given fake identities to closely monitor the inner workings of more than 1,000 political groups.
#mark_kennedy ►https://seenthis.net/tag/person:mark%20kennedy