Today’s launch of a new database of groups spied on by undercover police is long overdue and Rob Evans of the Guardian and the Undercover Research Group (URG) deserve our thanks for a job well done.
By laboriously piecing together information from disparate sources, they have managed to pinpoint 124 political and protest groups infiltrated over four decades by undercover officers from the Special Demonstrations Squad and the National Public Order Information Unit. The SDS was set up in 1968 and lasted lasted forty years. The NPOIU was formed in 1999.
The question of how many groups and which ones has been the subject of speculation for years. The figure originally given by the police themselves shortly after the undercover policing scandal broke was about 450. That always seemed far too low and it came as no surprise when the public inquiry said the true figure was over 1000. Since then campaigners have demanded the full list of groups be released but Mitting has steadfastly refused to do that.
The Guardian’s database lists groups from A-Z, starting with Action for Radical Change and ending with an anarchist group called Zero Collective. Alongside each group is the name of the spycop who targeted them and the dates of their deployment. There are also the cyphers given to each officer by the inquiry and a summary of what’s known.
There is also the facility to search by “group types”, and there are 17 categories of which all but one – Far right – are leftwing or progressive struggles. These cover protest movements like animal rights, environmental, anti-racist, anti-war, etc, leftwing and anarchist political groups, justice campaigns, trades unions and other categories such as Irish, progressive, civil liberties and community.
Clicking on “animal rights” produces 12 separate groups and nine spies. Some were involved in more than one group and some groups had several spies. The Animal Liberation Front, for instance had six, London Animal Action four. The cover names of the animal rights spies are listed as: Matt Rayner, Bob Robinson, John Barker, Andy Davey, Christine Green, James Straven, Mike Blake, Jim Sutton and Dave Evans.
The database covers only those officers the Inquiry has confirmed were spycops. So although Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty had numerous infiltrators, just Dave Evans is included. Three more have been profiled by URG on the Powerbase portal – Adrian Radford, Ritchie Clarke and Gary Rayner – but they are omitted from this list. I write about them here
The URG has its own list entitled “The Who’s Who of Spycop Targets” here The Database is the same as the Guardian but presented rather differently. There is also a Timeline of SDS undercover officers which is very good. It lists both named officers and those whose identity has been restricted by the inquiry and is interactive, so placing the cursor on a name gives further details including dates of deployment in a box below.
Both the URG and Rob Evans deserve our thanks for all the effort they have put into this. One of the more daunting aspects of this issue is getting to grips with such a mammoth amount of information spread over so many different sources. Having so much in one place is a real bonus and this resource will no doubt be used over again by spycops researchers and campaigners.
But, excellent though this is, it is really just the beginning. There is so much more to come. Even a cursory look at the animal rights entries reveals gaps. There are at least two more organisations spied on by Bob Lambert/Robinson that are not listed: Islington Animal Rights Campaign and The Federation of Local Animal Rights Groups. I’m sure many others will also have information they would like to add and for that reason the Guardian is asking people to contact them to share “stories, experiences and news tips” here
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