This is abominable—the incidents themselves and now the sanctioning of this disgusting behaviour by the British Home Office Minister.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call this sexual assault, but it seems pretty close to it. Note that all of the police officers involved are men—and all of their victims are women.

“The best way of stopping any liaison getting too heavy was to shag somebody else. It’s amazing how women don’t like you going to bed with someone else,” said the officer, whose undercover deployment infiltrating anti-racist groups lasted from 1993 to 1997. Two years later the SDS became the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, the secretive organisation that employed Kennedy and whose activities are the subject of three investigations.

The officer added that undercover police were strictly encouraged not to form a bond with women they were sleeping with and said that he knew Jim Boyling, the undercover officer who married an activist he was supposed to be spying upon.

Boyling has been suspended: his conduct is under current investigation. But the misconduct appears to be that he actually married the activist he was sleeping with.

When the revelations of these “undercover operations” first broke, senior police officials publicly wept and beat their breasts, but the Minister’s comments suggest that authorization for these outrages came from the very highest levels.

Can it happen here? Should it? Perhaps the current Minister of Torture and Surveillance will share his opinions with us.

[H/t BlueShoes55]