Kate Wilson: after spy cops case the Met is beyond redemption
I t is 10 years since I first sat down with a group of eight women to discuss bringing an assault case against the Metropolitan police. We were reeling from the discoveries that men we had loved never existed. I was tricked into a relationship with a man I knew as Mark Stone, who turned out to be a police spy, Mark Kennedy. The Met had sent serving officers into our lives to deceive us into sexual relationships and to spy on our political campaigns.
It quickly emerged that those relationships, which had at first felt like personal betrayals, were in fact part of a systematic practice, spanning decades, of police officers deceiving women into sex and targeting leftwing political organisations in order to undermine dissent.
On Thursday the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) handed down its ruling in my human rights claim. It identified a “formidable list” of breaches of fundamental human rights by the Met, including inhuman and degrading treatment, sexist discrimination and interference with my rights to hold political opinions and to freedom of expression and association.
The tribunal found the entire operation to be unlawful and concluded: “This is not just a case about a renegade police officer who took advantage of his undercover deployment to indulge his sexual proclivities … Our findings that the authorisations under RIPA [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act] were fatally flawed and the undercover operation could not be justified as ‘necessary in a democratic society’ … reveal disturbing and lamentable failings at the most fundamental levels.”
It is impossible for me to describe my emotions as I read those words. The police hide behind the narrative of the “rogue officer” to avoid accountability for the culture of toxic misogyny that they harbour within their ranks. Nothing makes that point more clearly than the rush to deny that Wayne Couzens was in any way representative of the police service. Cressida’ Dick said in June that the Met was home to the occasional “bad ’un”.
In my case the police tried to claim that engaging in a sexual relationship while deployed would be a breach of professional conduct, but the tribunal ruling states that this argument is “materially undermined by the sheer frequency with which Mark Kennedy [and other undercover officers] did conduct sexual relationships without either questions being asked or action being taken by senior officers”.
The findings stress that the police failed to put in place systems, safeguards or protections: training of undercover officers in relation to sexual relationships was grossly inadequate; there was a widespread failure of supervision and a disturbing lack of concern on the part of the police about the impact on women, concluding that the National Public Order Intelligence Unit’s approach to its officers having sex while undercover was one of “don’t ask, don’t tell”.
What makes this all the more disturbing is that those police officers should never have been introduced into our lives at all. The ruling stresses that the police failed to give any proper consideration or put structures in place to limit collateral intrusion into people’s private lives, and it describes open-ended authorisations, which were virtually meaningless as any kind of protection, calling the operation a “fishing expedition” that violated the right to protest, met no pressing social need and was “unnecessary in a democratic society”.
For the past 10 years the Met’s conduct of our cases has been a damage-limitation exercise seeking to avoid accountability and prevent campaigners and the courts gaining access to the truth. The tribunal criticised that conduct, stating that many documents “crie[d] out for an explanation” and that were it not for my tenacity and perseverance, “much of what this case has revealed would not have come to light”.
The Macpherson inquiry found the Met police to be institutionally racist. The inquiry into the Daniel Morgan case found them to be “institutionally corrupt”. I have no doubt it is a matter of time before they are recognised to be institutionally sexist. This lack of accountability has got to stop. That does not simply mean calling for resignations. Cressida Dick’s resignation will not address these systemic problems that go back decades. What is required is a serious rethink and root-and-branch changes to the Metropolitan police service, an institution that is, in my opinion, beyond redemption.