https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/17/stephen-lawrence-police-officer-allegedly-spied-family-identified-david-hagan
The importance of the naming #spycop N81 as Dave Haganhttp://undercoverresearch.net/2018/04/17/the-importance-of-the-naming-spycop-n81-as-dave-hagen/25 years
This week it’s 25 years since teenager Stephen Lawrence was killed in a racist attack. Stephen and his friend Duwayne Brooks were on their way home when they were attacked by a gang in Eltham, south east London. Stephen was stabbed twice and managed to run more than 100 yards before collapsing and bleeding to death.
Stephen’s murder has come to represent much more than one incident of tragic brutality by a racist gang. In the last 25 years the Metropolitan Police failure to investigate the murder properly has become a symbol of corruption and institutional racism.
The allegations that (mostly black) families campaigning for justice of loved ones who had died at the hands of the police had been spied upon with the intention to smear them were made by Peter Francis, the former undercover officer turned whistle blower. A subsequent investigation by Mark Ellison, QC confirmed that these families were indeed targeted. On the day the Ellison Review was published, in March 2014, Theresa May, then still Home Secretary, announced that a public inquiry into undercover policing would be set up.
Using the name Pete Black, Francis was instructed to target anti-racist groups in London. Francis told the Channel 4 Dispatches current affairs programme that his brief could ‘be summarised in two words, and that is Stephen Lawrence.’ He had been tasked to spy on the Lawrence family to find information with which to discredit them and thereby reduce their considerable public sympathy. In August 2014 Francis told The Guardian:
From being in two groups, Youth Against Racism in Europe and the Movement for Justice, I – along with help from other SDS Officers, via their groups – managed to monitor about 12 different well-known black justice campaigns when I was deployed from 1993 to 1997.
On 30 July 1997 Home Secretary Jack Straw announced a judicial inquiry into the mishandled police investigation of Stephen’s murder, and to identify lessons for police in dealing with racially-motivated crimes. It was chaired by Sir William Macpherson, a retired High Court judge.
In 2010, Peter Francis, then as Officer A, recalled how the political and personal pressure on him reached its peak at that point:
When the Macpherson inquiry was first announced there was huge, huge internal concern whether or not the remit of the Macpherson inquiry would actually mean that we had to disclose that the entire time there was actually undercover police officers devoted to the black campaigns. The SDS come Special Branch Senior Management decided that there was no way could anybody actually know there was undercover officers deployed in those campaigns.
The Macpherson Inquiry was a defining moment for the Metropolitan police, and policing in general. It ruled that the police were institutionally racist, and the Lawrence family’s description of the police behaving like ‘white masters during slavery’ accepted as fact.
Covering up the undercovers
As such, the Metropolitan Police could not afford to be seen as hiding things from the Macpherson Inquiry; yet they chose not to disclose the SDS spying operations, let alone the extent of it. An important question for the current Inquiry would be who in Special Branch took the decision to not to reveal this.
In 2013, then Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe declared he was ‘personally shocked’ by Mr Francis’s claims, saying: ‘If these allegations are true, it’s a disgrace, and the Metropolitan Police Service will apologise. Smearing the family of a murder victim would never be acceptable to me or my officers.’ The Commissioner at the time of Macpherson, Paul Condon however, denied the claims: ‘I can say categorically that at no time during my time as commissioner did I authorise or condone or was aware of the sort of smear operation that’s been described in the Guardian’.
Three weeks later, Mick Creedon, head of Operation Herne, the police’s own investigation into the undercover scandal, told the Commons Home Affairs committee that his investigation had recently found documents recording ‘covert deployments which reported intelligence which relate’ to the Lawrence family and that Hogan-Howe had been made aware of this. The intelligence had been collected as the undercover officers were spying on what he said were ‘violent protest groups’ campaigning for a proper police investigation into the teenager’s murder, adding that such groups ‘may well hook on to any high-profile incident as a vehicle for their violent protests’. As we will note in another article, this is a mischaracterisation verging on libel.
Further comments from Creedon show the police continuing to try wriggle out of the accusations they were spying on black justice campaigns: ‘The fact that an undercover deployment made a reference to the Stephen Lawrence family does not mean there was an undercover deployment against the Stephen Lawrence family.’ This is a word-game, the actual target according the SDS reasoning would have been the organisation trying to ‘hijack the campaign’, while information gathered on the Lawrences and other black families would have been stored almost accidentally, the Assistant Commissioner for Professionalism Martin Hewitt called it ‘collateral intrusion’ (about as cynical as calling civil casualties of an American airstrike (collateral damage’).
Of course this was a lie. And in fact, the reality was far worse.
Secret meeting in the garden of Bob Lambert
Two investigations were set up into the allegations of spying on the Lawrences. One was conducted by Operation Herne, the other by Mark Ellison QC. The findings were presented a year later, both on the same day. Unsurprisingly, Operation Herne concluded there was not enough evidence to back up what Peter Francis had said. Ellison however, based on largely the same material, ruled that indeed there was a case to make. And this is where N81 comes in.
Ellison zoomed in on a meeting between N81 and Det. Insp. Richard Walton that took place in August 1998. At the time of the meeting Walton was part of the Lawrence Review Team, a group of officers tasked with preparing Commissioner Condon’s submissions to the MacPherson Inquiry, while N81 was infiltrating a political group in London involved in anti-racism campaigns and was active around the Inquiry, including visiting it.
Ellison considered the meeting between an active undercover officer and the Lawrence Review Team highly inappropriate, labelling it wrong-headed. It showed that information gathered by spying was used to mould the Commissioner’s response to what was supposed to be an independent inquiry. While worries about possible riots are used by those responsible as the main reason for the infiltration of campaign groups back in the days, Ellison concluded there was no conceivable ‘public order’ justification for it. On the contrary, the spying itself amount to that the risk – if it had come out at the time. Ellison wrote ‘the MPS may itself have caused the real risk of the public disorder and the kind of ‘meltdown’ it so feared.’
Spying on black justice campaigns
We learned today that N81 was deployed from 1996-2001 into – amongst other ones – the Movement for Justice, a group aligning itself with black family campaigns fighting for justice for relatives who died in police custody (– we detail the campaigns they were involved in another blogpost today). Peter Francis had been one of the founding members of the organisation in 1995, coming from another anti-racist organisation Youth Against Racism in Europe; he was pulled in 1997. N81 probably replaced him.
All that was publicly known of N81 to date was based on the material lifted from the Ellison Review. Though relatively scant, we were nevertheless been able to put together a relatively comprehensive profile of N81, based on it and other small bits of information that leaked into the public domain.
The fact that N81 was well-placed in relation to the Lawrence family campaign is clear from the Ellison Review, and undisputed. Whether he targeted the campaign or not is an issue exclusively of police semantics. The facts are clear from the type of intelligence he gathered, summed up in the Ellison report:
* Material on the relationship and intention of the target group;
* Decisions by the Lawrence family on whether to allow demonstrations outside the (Macpherson) Inquiry venue;
* Reports of protests;
* Who was and who was not supporting what the Lawrence family wanted, including the call by Doreen Lawrence for the resignation of the Commissioner in August 1998;
* The internal working of the Lawrence family campaign;
* Personal details of the Lawrence family;
* Escaping accountability
It is in this context that the meeting between N81 and Richard Walton took place. It was set up by Bob Lambert who was the Detective Inspector with responsibility for N81 within the SDS in 1998 and happened on a Sunday afternoon in the garden of his house. Lambert at that moment in time was also the acting Detective Chief Inspector – effectively in charge of the Squad.
In the late 1990s – as Ellison documented – nobody had any second thoughts about the meeting. It was only after Richard Walton was informed that he was going to be criticised by Ellison that he understood he was in trouble. His attempt to change his account was dismissed by Ellison, and the subsequent fall-out would lead to Walton being temporarily removed from his post as Commander of Counter Terrorism Command in March 2014.
The case was referred to the Independent Police Complaint Commission (IPCC) to investigate his ‘discreditable conduct and breaches of honesty and integrity’ and the ‘inconsistent accounts to Mr Ellison’s review team regarding his actions’. The then Detective Inspector Bob Lambert and then Commander of Operations for Special Branch Colin Black – both identified in the Report as having played a part in facilitating the meeting with the undercover N81 – would be also be investigated, though only for “discreditable conduct”.
Two years later, the IPCC ruled that both Walton and Lambert would have had a case to answer, because their actions could have potentially undermined the public inquiry into the case and public confidence in it. Walton announced his retirement days before the findings were made public, while Lambert had long left the Met, so nothing happened.
Was the spying on family justice campaigns steered by undercovers?
However, an important question is not being asked. Was the involvement with the family justice campaign a genuine plan of the group, or was it – intended or not – the result of N81 undercover efforts? An ‘SDS briefing note’ dated 2001 (towards the end of N81’s deployment) emphasises the success of the operation, saying:
N81 is quite candid in admitting that (N81) was largely responsible for (N81’s group’s) adoption of the Stephen Lawrence case, and the rest, as they say, is history.
However, N81 does not remember saying such a thing, or so he told Ellison. While, as we consider elsewhere, the main activity of the group ‘Dave Hagan’ was infiltrating seems to have been supporting family justice and anti-racism campaigns. All in all, this indicates that N81’s deployment was part of a far more deliberate targeting of those seeking to hold the police’s own crimes and racism to account.
To find out that the police targeted family justice groups rather than seeking murderers has been a further twist of the knife for many who lost loved ones.
With N81’s cover name now in the public domain, it’s time to get answers – particularly on how the anti-racism campaigns of the late 1990s were targeted.
Though there is one final twist. While N81’s cover name is being released, the Inquiry Chair, John Mitting, has chosen to withhold the name of some other key officers in the SDS at the time.
The battles are not over yet, this just one step in the right direction.
