Ash Cameron - Confessions of an Undercover Cop

The salon photographer had taken a couple of pictures and I have no idea if any were ever used. I’ve never had the stomach to look in any hairdressing magazines.

The next day I took a trip to my regular salon and had it tidied up, which is what I should have done in the first instance.

Therein lie a couple more of life’s lessons:

1) Sometimes it’s necessary to lie and 2) there’s no such thing as a free haircut.

There is so much to learn when working undercover, aside from surveillance techniques. Of course I’m not going to reveal tactics and practical working methods, though I’ll let you into some of the more interesting aspects of the job. But first, before any of that, there is a huge amount of law and protocol to understand and adhere to. If you don’t know it, you can’t work with it.

RIPA, The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000, governs the use of covert (undercover) operations. Prior to RIPA, 2000, permission for such jobs fell under different regulations, but today these operations require the highest authority. Chief constables are vested with the power to authorise officers to use directed surveillance, to tap phones, intercept mail and email, to put bugs in houses, cameras in offices and so on. It has to be necessary and either in the interests of national security, for the prevention and detection of crime, or to prevent disorder or otherwise in the interests of public safety. There are other reasons but these are the main reasons police use such operations.

Chief constables delegate to high-ranking senior officers, normally the head of the crime department, a commander or chief superintendent, or whoever the relevant force policy dictates at the time. The sorts of offences investigated using covert surveillance are serious crime such as murder, paedophile rings, high-scale drug dealing, major fraud, armed robbery and national security. It can prove and disprove someone’s guilt. It’s expensive and time consuming, the operations long and arduous. And it doesn’t always bring results. Before resorting to covert surveillance methods evidence should be gathered another way, if at all possible.

Barristers and judges are, as you would expect, hot on RIPA and the use of it. It has to be sound, justified and significant. It will be tested in the courtroom and evidence will be dismissed if it hasn’t been gathered and recorded correctly. There is no room for error.

Specialist officers are assigned to plant the bugs, cameras and other devices. Justifying the expense is a major headache for the budget holders and, of course, it is a factor that influences decision-making. The easiest, and probably cheapest, method is a phone tap. A boring job but someone has to do it, listening in to phone calls.

House bugs helped us to secure a conviction for a couple that had systematically abused their baby. The father got a life sentence when the child died and the recorded conversations in the couple’s kitchen were invaluable in proving his guilt.

Phone calls nabbed a national paedophile ring that planned to kidnap a nine-year-old girl.

Many a bad cop has been rooted out through intrusive and covert surveillance and in those cases the judge highly commended the use of covert ops.

The general public think the police can do more and know more than they actually do, so if you think they’re watching you, they probably aren’t. But it might be the DSS, or the NHS, or the Tax Office, or the Local Authority, or Customs, or one of many other organisations covered by RIPA …

When I joined the surveillance team I found that undercover work is 90 per cent boredom and 2 per cent action. But, oh, what action! The other bits of the job involved meetings, briefings and admin. We did a lot of sitting around in cars. We would sit up in buildings, on park benches, and traipse and trawl the streets. Occasionally we had to mingle, mix with suspects, and pretend to be someone we weren’t. It was a bit like acting, but not at all like it’s portrayed on the screen. It was also dangerous and addictive and far from a nine-to-five job, or foot patrol.

Surveillance units function locally, regionally and nationally, often overlapping, working together on joint operations that include phone tapping, house bugging, following people and accessing information on suspects, as per RIPA and other legislation. Our job was to gather information, intelligence and evidence, to find out what we could about suspects, the things they did and who they mixed with, and also to build up a profile of them. Sometimes we’d be given dossiers on criminals and we had to do the rest of the legwork, tracing and tracking them and monitoring their every move. We didn’t often get in on the arrests, either. We would assist these bigger inquiries and investigations and pass the information back to source once the objectives were achieved. We also worked on our own cases. And although it could be monotonous, trailing someone who didn’t do much for hours, you always had to keep sharp. A foot wrong and cover would be blown; you’d lose the whole thing, making it a costly and botched operation.

A lot of long hours are spent working closely with colleagues of the opposite sex. You’re in situations where you have to depend on each other entirely and trust is essential. It’s not unusual to form close friendships that, even if innocent, threaten personal relationships. The unpredictable lifestyle, having to drop everything to go off on a job, not knowing when you’ll return, can be a strain. I was fortunate, I suppose, that during my years working undercover and in plain clothes, I didn’t live with a partner.

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