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Two senior officers who supervised an undercover Scotland Yard unit spying on political campaigns were “horribly and incredibly” racist, a whistleblower has told a public inquiry.
Peter Francis, a former member of the unit, testified that one regularly used the “N-word”, while the other used a repertoire of explicit racist slurs.
Francis told the spycops inquiry on Monday he also heard “racist banter” among the undercover officers while he worked for the Metropolitan police unit in the 1990s.
He is the only undercover officer who has blown the whistle on the covert operations of his former unit, the special demonstration squad (SDS), and has over many years detailed its misconduct and inner workings.
The inquiry, led by the retired judge Sir John Mitting, was set up in 2014 after Francis revealed to the Guardian that the SDS had covertly monitored the campaign run by the family of Stephen Lawrence after he was murdered.
The family was seeking at the time to compel the Met to investigate the 1993 murder properly and bring the teenager’s killers to justice.
Francis said special branch, the secretive police division that directed the undercover unit, was “100% racist” towards the Lawrence family, viewing them “as unable to think for themselves or come up with and run their campaign themselves, so it was considered they must be being led by someone else”.
The inquiry is examining as one of its main issues how and why undercover officers employed by the SDS collected information about Doreen and Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s parents, and their supporters. The Met has apologised for putting the Lawrences under surveillance.
About 139 undercover officers spied on tens of thousands of mainly leftwing activists between 1968 and at least 2010.
Francis, who infiltrated anti-racist and leftwing campaigners between 1993 and 1997, is giving evidence over four days this week at the inquiry.
In a statement published on Monday, he described one senior officer, Det Ch Supt Robert Potter, as “horribly racist”. Potter was a senior special branch officer who oversaw the work of the unit.
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Francis said Potter, whose nickname was “Potty Bob”, attended meetings of the SDS and discussed black justice campaigns. Potter “would use the N-word to describe the campaigns and impress on me the importance of stopping these ‘effing [N-word]s’”, Francis said. Potter, who is now dead, had denied the allegations.
Potter was forced out of the police after he had behaved in a racist and insulting way while drunk at a Gala bingo hall in October 1993.
Francis said the head of the SDS in the early part of his deployment was “also incredibly racist”. This senior officer, a detective chief inspector, has been given anonymity by the inquiry and is known only as HN86.
HN86’s “view of the black justice campaigns was that they were unable to think for themselves and therefore they must all be being led by the more radical leftwing groups looking to advance their own agendas,” Francis said.
He said HN86 referred to black justice campaigners in “extremely racist” termssuch as “monkeys” who were “led by the ring through their noses”.
The SDS only employed one black officer while Francis was in the unit. Trevor Morris infiltrated the Anti-Nazi League and the Socialist Workers party between 1991 and 1995. According to Francis, HN86 did not trust Morris because he was “one of them”. HN86 allegedly said he was not sure that Morris would pass on information about black justice campaigns because he could have “gone over” to their side.
HN86, who denies the claims, is taking legal action that would prevent him being questioned by the inquiry.
Francis has said that some of the anti-racist campaigners he spied on took part in violent confrontations with fascists – a claim denied by the activists who have accused him of fabrication and exaggeration.
