Spycops

The ‘spycops’ scandal has laid bare the existence of secretive police units that sent undercover police officers to infiltrate and undermine hundreds of political campaigns and activist groups. This is the first academic analysis of the activists’ experiences and their attempts to find answers and accountability in the Undercover Policing Inquiry. Written from the perspective of the ‘policed’, the author draws on extensive fieldwork and his first-hand experience of police infiltration through his participation in climate campaigns. This book presents a sociological analysis of the British spycops scandal and the Undercover Policing Inquiry that followed. A series of exposures of police officers who infiltrated political movements has broken apart the shield of secrecy that normally obscures covert state activity. They revealed the controversial undercover tactics used to spy on political activists and allow for novel, empirically-rich examinations of covert surveillance. In this book, the long-running Undercover Policing Inquiry serves as the site of research where secrecy and disclosure are key battlegrounds. Here, conflicting arguments over matters of power, harm, privacy, human rights and accountability present the public inquiry, held under the Inquiries Act 2005, as a site of struggle. While activists demand answers about the infiltration of their lives, police bodies seek to limit public access to its operations. The book follows the Undercover Policing Inquiry through its first eight years. The author has analysed the oral and written evidence given to it, observed its public hearings and carried out in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, including activists who were spied on. He moves the complex political and legal dilemmas of transparency and confidentiality in public inquiries to the centre of analysis and explores ways of re-appraising the fundamental notions of truth, justice and state power.