The Secret Policeman’s balls-up

It was probably in my sixth post on this blog, way back in January- about Mark Stone, the undercover policeman “embedded” with a group of climate change protesters – that I wrote:

It would be interesting to discover whether the CPS were aware of the undercover officer. Don’t know if we’ll ever hear …

Well DAMN. There I was with Newsnight tuned in, and this is busting wide open. Looks like the Guardian will be breaking the story again. The suggestion appears to be that the Crown Prosecution Service – or some people within it – were entirely aware of Mr. Stone’s role.

And that some of the protesters were convicted, because the evidence that would have acquitted them wasn’t passed to their lawyers. You may recall that the prosecution pulled out of those trials scheduled for after the revelations.

By extension, one could suppose that there might have been a little bit of a cover-up (when the CPS investigated itself).

If the allegations can be substantiated, then we should see some lawyers going to jail for this.

Unless, of course, it turns out that this is just more bureaucratic nonsense imposed on us by the unelected judiciary / Europe ? (delete as preferred)

[Edit 9/6/2011] The Guardian reports that there’s to be an independent enquiry. I’m going to keep my eye on this one...

the undercover policeman …

The BBC has reported (on 11th January) the collapse of the prosecution of  a number of green activists, after an undercover policeman (Mark Kennedy aka Mark Stone) agreed to testify for the defence.

Most of the reporting was actually about whether the detective had “gone native”. Some – such as Mark Easton’s blog – questioned the role of police officers acting as agents provocateur. I’ve got some different thoughts …

It would be interesting to discover whether the CPS were aware of the undercover officer. Don’t know if we’ll ever hear …

But a cynic might suspect something more banal than the government conspiracy that’s doubtless going to be touted.

The same cynic could, perhaps, venture that a senior policeperson somewhere had “green-lighted” the spend – quoted as “hundreds of thousands of pounds”. And they’d have had to explain why that hadn’t resulted in any arrests. So arrests had to be made, even though there hadn’t necessarily been any crime committed. Add to that the kudos that would result from cracking a cell of dangerous anarchists, and crafting shaky prosecutions wold look like a real win-win for the career path ….

Even though that resulted in the threat of prosecution and possible imprisonment being held over so many citizens for over 18 months.

Just to make it clear -I’m not trying to pillory any individual here. But it highlights the potential for dysfunctional outcomes when the culture and/or metrics of an organisation don’t match the purpose. So – in this case – the more the police “invest” in a case, the greater the “return” (in terms of the number and severity of convictions) that is expected.

Of course, I’m sure that the IPCC will be examining those motivations when they undertake the review that Nottinghamshire police have asked for.

On the face of it, I feel Mr. Kennedy should be commended for his integrity.

(And – as an aside – it would also, perhaps, be interesting to discover the role of undercover police in the recent student protests).

Sorry I didn’t get to this a bit more quickly