CORRUPTION SQUAD UNDER FIRE

The Metropolitan police's much vaunted anti-corruption drive, which has been
under way for six years, is now itself the subject of three inquiries
because of allegations over the way it operates, an investigation by the
Guardian has revealed.

The inquiries into the complaints investigation branch (CIB), two of them
internal and one by an outside force, have been prompted by complaints that
the anti-corruption squad, dubbed the Untouchables, used discredited methods
to pursue serving and former officers.

They include entrapment operations; inducements to supergrasses;
non-disclosure to the defence of vital documents in court cases; widespread
breaches of laws regulating police evidence-gathering procedures; and double
standards in the handling of complaints.

One solicitor involved in a recently collapsed trial said aspects of the CIB
strategy reflected a return to discredited policing methods prevalent in the
1960s and 1970s.

Commander Andy Hayman, director of the CIB, said it was not able to sustain
the current effort and was reassessing its methods.

In a briefing earlier this week, Scotland Yard said 75 people had been
charged with corruption offences, including 26 serving police officers and
11 former officers. Of the 26 serving officers, there have been five
convictions and one acquittal, and one is awaiting sentence.

The Yard said 70 serving officers had been suspended. What they did not
reveal was that the CIB has secured only seven convictions for major
corruption in six years. And of those seven, four are of supergrasses -
three of them serving police officers who have turned on their former
colleagues, and the other a retired detective.

Four high-profile court cases have collapsed, and the crown prosecution
service has decided not to proceed against more than 80 serving officers -
the majority of them named by the supergrasses.

Of the 70 officers still suspended, more than two-thirds have not been
charged and a significant number, which the Yard will not disclose, have
already been cleared internally of any criminal activity.

The results are very different to those envisaged in 1994, when the
anti-corruption drive was launched amid great secrecy by the then
Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Paul Condon.

In a dramatic flourish, he pledged there would be "no hiding place" for
corrupt, dishonest or unethical police officers. In 1997 he told a Commons
select committee his intelligence chiefs had identified up to 250 "bent
coppers", mainly in specialist squads.

But the Guardian has learned that as well as an apparent failure to catch
and convict corrupt officers on the scale promised, the CIB is being
undermined from within - most obviously by its reliance on supergrasses.

Serving officers in the Met's organised crime group - the squads that target
drug traffickers and armed robbers - said it was ironic that the CIB was
relying so heavily on the old supergrass system which the rest of the Met
had long since replaced with less problematic methods of evidence gathering,
such as infiltration by undercover officers.

The CIB has always had a reputation for unconventional methods. Much of its
operational strategy is driven by a secret intelligence unit, dubbed the
"ghost squad".

Cmdr Hayman said: "We are operating within the criminal justice system but
that is difficult because we are right at the cutting edge of policing."

He was keen to "push the parameters" of the system to be ahead of the
officers being targeted. Cutting-edge methods used in the past include
covert surveillance and bugging - inside homes, offices, squad cars and
police stations.

In one case UKP500,000 of cannabis was planted in an east London flat, and
word passed to two flying squad officers, who were then caught on video
trying to steal the drugs. The pair were convicted and turned supergrass.

But even this case went partly wrong when a third officer, who was
acquitted, then alleged he had been offered inducements, including a reduced
sentence, a safe house, a new identity and financial help on release.

Sir John Stevens, who took over as the Met's commissioner last month, was
made aware of the problems surrounding CIB tactics after a discreet lunch
last November with Lady Emily Blatch, a conservative peer.

She told the Guardian she was concerned that the CIB was acting on the basis
of "preordained guilt" to "meet targets". She told Sir John it was important
"to root out corruption without bringing disrepute on the Met".

The CIB denies arrests were made to justify Sir Paul's "speculation" that
there were up to 250 corrupt officers in the Met. But police sources said
there is a secret blacklist of 200 officers, whom the CIB regards as
"untrustworthy", compiled from intelligence gathered by the ghost squad.