Undercover police tactics ‘unjustified’, says report

They were a secretive group of undercover police officers set up to infiltrate left-wing groups following violent anti-Vietnam war protests in 1968.

Members of the ‘Special Demonstration Squad’ took on new identities and forged long term, sometimes sexual, relationships with the people they were spying on.

Now a report into the first 14 years of their activities has concluded they were monitoring people who overwhelmingly “posed no threat”, and that the unit should have been shut down almost immediately.