British police spied on grieving black families for decades. Now we want the truth

United Families and Friends Campaign procession, October 2004. Photo: Kevin Blowe

An inquiry into ‘spycops’ operations is still not asking the big questions. So we’re launching a campaign to do it ourselves.

Over five years have now passed since Theresa May, then the Home Secretary, announced a public inquiry following “profoundly shocking and disturbing” evidence that Metropolitan Police undercover officers had targeted the grieving parents of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and their campaign for justice for their son.

Despite Sir John Mitting’s ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry spending over £21m, we are still waiting for public hearings to commence in the summer of 2020. In July, however, the inquiry did finally manage to publish the fake identity of a black undercover police officer, “Anthony Bobby Lewis”, who gathered intelligence on the Lawrences and their supporters.

“Lewis”, like a number of other undercover officers, has admitted he deceived a woman into a long-term relationship while using his fake identity. The exposure of this kind of abusive manipulation has forced senior officers to publicly apologise to other women who were targeted in this way.

What we still do not know, however, is how many campaigns like the Lawrences, led by grieving families and friends seeking justice for their loved ones after a racist murder or a death in police custody, were targeted? Five years ago the police said there were eighteen but no full list of those spied on has ever been published — although they said “the majority” were black.

One of the groups that fought for justice for bereaved families was Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), which I was an active campaigner with from 1990 — until it was forced to close due to lack of funds in 2015. Its focus was on providing practical and legal support to victims of racist violence and the oppressive policing of black communities in east London.

Over that period, NMP helped to organise and supported numerous campaigns, from work with the Tamil family of Panchadcharam Sahitharan who was murdered in Manor Park in 1992; the death in police custody of Shiji Lapite in Hackney in 1994; Ibrahima Sey’s death in Ilford police station in 1996; all the way through to the aftermath of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by armed officers at Stockwell police station in 2005 — and the legal battle that followed.

Just at the families we supported were spied on, the police have subsequently confirmed that NMP too was monitored — even though our important work was funded by the local council and the national lottery.

Why was so much police work put towards spying on the bereaved and their supporters? We are convinced that political policing units and their masters were primarily motivated by a desire to protect the Met’s already damaged reputation: they did so by deliberately trying to portray campaigns seeking truth and accountability as an inherent risk of public disorder. This is, unquestionably in our view, a consequence of the police’s institutionally racist attitude to the “threat” posed by racialised communities in the UK.

Unfortunately, although some family justice campaigners were accepted by the Undercover Policing Inquiry as ‘core participants’ in its deliberations, others have not. Instead, they remain ‘under review’ until the Inquiry says it finds evidence of spying at a later stage.

Unfortunately, over the last five years, it has become increasingly clear the transparency and fairness we all want is unlikely to come from the inquiry unless we push for answers ourselves.

Most still have no further information. Despite Sir John Mitting’s inquiry saying that more than a thousand groups were targeted, we still have no idea of the true scale of covert intelligence-gathering on black justice campaigns.

This is why the organisation I work for, the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) — founded a decade ago by groups including NMP — is launching a campaign with the Undercover Research Group to investigate the question the inquiry refuses to answer: how many black families were targeted by undercover officers?

This new investigation aims to expand on work undertaken by the Undercover Research Group last year with The Guardian, which resulted in the publishing of a list of “spycops” targets.

Almost all of these family justice campaigns no longer exist and so we are hoping people who once organised or participated in them will get in touch and help us expand on public knowledge of police surveillance on their activities. The annual remembrance procession, led by the
family and friends of those who have died in the custody of police and
prison officers, takes place in central London tomorrow.

Unfortunately, over the last five years, it has become increasingly clear the transparency and fairness we all want is unlikely to come from the inquiry unless we push for answers ourselves.

If you can help, please contact researcher Eveline Lubbers at the Undercover Research Group in confidence at evel@undercoverresearch.net

Kevin Blowe is the coordinator of the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol)

This post appeared originally as a “Comment is Free” article for the Guardian.