What lengths should the police be allowed to go to in order to gain intelligence that will help them keep the public order and prevent law-breaking? When are undercover police operations legitimate and when are they not? And are police spies out of control?
These are some of the questions that arise from the extraordinary career of PC Mark Stone, alias the supposed environmental campaigner, Mark Stone. His exposure this week as an undercover police spy caused a trial to be abandoned and protesters who’ve already been convicted now believe they may have grounds for appeal. It has also produced a chorus of demands for any number of inquiries.
PC Kennedy became a copper with the Metropolitan Police in the mid-1990s. But around 2003 he was seconded to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to become an undercover spy. He was given a new name and a false driving licence and passport. He grew his hair, swapped his police uniform for the casual scruff of dissent and started to infiltrate the environmental protest movement. Over the next seven years he went on numerous protests along with others campaigning for radical changes in government policies around the world to tackle climate change.
He posed as a climber, someone able to shin up high buildings to publicise the protesters’ case. He acted as a driver and his readiness to put his hand in his pocket to help finance campaigns and even pay his fellow protesters’ fines earned him the nickname ‘Flash’. And on the way he had numerous affairs with young women campaigners. All the while he was feeding back to his handlers information on what environmental campaigners were up to.
One of his greatest ‘successes’ involved the help he seems to have given in trying to organise a large-scale protest at the coal-fired power station at Ratcliff-on-Soar in 2009. This required a meeting beforehand at a school in Nottingham on Easter Monday of those who wanted to protest. But the protesters were met by a force of over four hundred police. One hundred and fourteen of them were arrested and twenty six charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass. Twenty of them admitted they had planned to break into the power station and were sentenced earlier this month. But the judge gave them lenient sentences, saying they had been acting with 'the highest possible motives'.
It was the decision of the remaining six to claim that they had not yet made up their minds whether or not to break into the power station that ultimately led to the public exposure of Kennedy/Stone. For back in October, some of his fellow campaigners confronted him with evidence of his double life. They had become suspicious of him when, alone among the 114 arrested the previous year, he had sought a separate legal defence. They discovered his real passport and other evidence of his true identity and he confessed. He seems also to have had a change of heart. He said: 'I’ll just say I’m sorry for everything. It really hurts'. He offered to give evidence in support of the six still on trial. Prosecutors had no option but to abandon the case. The twenty already convicted are considering an appeal.
The fiasco raises any number of questions. The most obvious is what undercover police officers should and should not be allowed to do in order to gain intelligence. Few people would want to argue that all police spying is wrong. Intelligence, after all, is a vital part of police work. The most innocent sort of spying is simple observation, but a purely passive, onlooker role is unlikely to be productive, not least because plausibility requires the infiltrator of a campaigning organisation to be an activist too. But when does an undercover spy become an agent provocateur? By contributing money, helping to organise and encouraging his fellow campaigners to press on with their protest, an undercover police officer could be said to be inciting the very thing he is trying to prevent. If this leads to a prosecution having to be dropped, the whole thing is self-defeating. And is it right for a policeman to use sex as a way of gaining information?
Another obvious question is what sort of organisations is it legitimate for police spies to infiltrate? The police seem to have begun to take infiltration seriously back in the early 1990s when some animal rights campaigners were resorting to violent tactics in order to pursue their ends. Groups thought to have terrorist ambitions are almost certainly infiltrated by the police in order to gain information which will prevent them from carrying out their atrocities and most people would think that a justifiable police strategy.
But many would also argue that environmental campaigners are of a wholly different order. Most of them are committed to peaceful opposition to policies they regard as harmful to the whole community, a point endorsed by the judge in the trial of the twenty convicted of conspiracy over the Ratcliff-on-Soar power station. Their solicitor, Mike Schwartz, said: 'The police need to answer some serious questions about their conduct relating to protesters. This is a serious attack on peaceful, accountable protest on issues of public and pressing importance like climate change. One expects there to be undercover police on serious operations to investigate serious crime. This was quite the opposite. This was civil disobedience, which has a long history in this country and should be protected'.
And there is the issue of accountability. At a simple level there is the matter of cost. It has been estimated that Kennedy/Stone’s career as a spy among environmental campaigners cost the taxpayer around £1.75m. But more widely the whole accountability of the police spying operation is regarded by many as far too opaque. Police spies work for a body called the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, an offshoot of ACPO which itself exists formally as a limited company, independent of the systems of accountability that operate for the police forces whose chief officers belong to it.
Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said in the light of the Kennedy/Stone case: 'There is the whole issue of what ACPO is. It’s a limited company. It’s an odd sort of organisation. There should be published guidelines. … It is particularly important that the public understands what the principles and what the rules are. The fact that this operation is so opaque, nobody knows how it is run, what the objectives were, why it ran for so long. I think that’s quite alarming'.
What’s your view?
- What do you make of the Kennedy/Stone case?
- Do you think police undercover operations are in principle legitimate or not? If you think they are, what sort of guidelines, if any, do you think they should work according to?
- Do you think political protest movements, such as the one PC Kennedy infiltrated, are legitimate targets or not?
- What sort of methods should an undercover officer be able to use? Is the use of sex a justifiable method?
- Is it defensible or not for police spies to act as agents provocateur?
- Do you regard ACPO as a sufficiently accountable body or not?
- And what reforms would you like to see in the whole area of how police gain intelligence?
