'Tighten up' undercover police ops

Feb 2 2012

Undercover officers have helped prevent bomb attacks and seize weapons from extremists but future operations should be approved in advance by high-level authorities outside the police, a report says.

Tighter controls are needed after Mark Kennedy, who spent seven years posing as long-haired drop-out climber Mark "Flash" Stone, ignored orders, carried on working after being arrested and seems to have believed he was best placed to make decisions about his deployment, inspectors said.

His actions led to the collapse of the case against six protesters accused of planning to invade the second largest power station in the UK.

Sir Denis O'Connor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, called for police chiefs to establish a system where prior approval from the Office of Surveillance Commissioners (OSC) would be needed for pre-planned, long-term operations.

Currently, the Home Secretary's approval is needed before a bug can be set up, which may take 15 seconds, but an assistant chief constable can sign off putting an undercover officer in place, sometimes for years, he said.

While there were "only a handful of this kind of undercover deployments active at any one time", operations were not controlled as well as those in other units which used undercover officers to tackle serious criminality.

This may have been because undercover officers in what was the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) were seeking intelligence to stop criminal activity, rather than evidence to be used in courts, inspectors said.

Sir Denis said that while the ability to use undercover officers was "an absolutely essential tactic to protect people", a series of controls should be brought in to test whether a potential deployment is necessary and proportionate.

He called for a clearer distinction between public order policing and tackling domestic extremism, which are now both part of the National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU), with extremism being managed under the counter-terrorism network in the future.

Sir Denis also revealed he had referred a matter involving an issue of control within the Metropolitan Police's Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which was closed down in 2008, to the police watchdog after inspectors uncovered documents containing information "we thought could be problematic".