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Spycop unit should have been shut down, inquiry finds
A general view of the outside of New Scotland Yard
A SECRET police unit that spied on over a 1,000 left-wing groups over 40 years should have been disbanded shortly after it was created, a public inquiry said today.
Inquiry chairman Sir John Mitting, a retired judge, said in an interim report that the tactics used by police spies to infiltrate protest groups in the 1970s and ’80s were not justified.
He found that out of the hundreds of groups targeted by officers in the Special Demonstration Squad between 1968 and 1982 he would only have considered three a “legitimate target.”
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