Confessions of an undercover cop: 'it almost felt like i did more harm than good'

Neil Woods 15 September 2016 8:00am BST When I was a kid growing up in the Peak District in the 1970s, I was obsessed by old-fashioned adventure stories. The likes of _Boy’s Own_ and

_Hornblower_ had me enraptured. They were tales in which the central figure would go on a journey and always act with the best intentions, protecting others at all costs. It must have sunk

in, because that was exactly what I thought I’d be doing when I joined the police force as a naïve 19-year-old in 1989: I assumed I’d be catching the bad guys and doing the right thing. When

I left the force more than two decades later, though, it almost felt as though I’d done more harm than good. In those early days I was absolutely terrible at police work. Starting in

Allenton, a grotty suburb of Derby which had one of the highest crime rates in the country at the time, I instantly found I was far too cautious and averse to any sort of conflict – often

messing up potentially simple arrests. Eventually I hardened up, though, and impressed my superiors enough that they offered me a placement with the Drugs Squad. It was a dream position for

a young police officer in the early 90s: the dramatic rise in drug-related crime meant all the best resources were being given over to tackling the problem, and I immediately had the chance

to get involved in proper surveillance work. Normally this was done in a car, tracking drug dealers and gangsters to different locations, but often it wasn’t enough to stay watching from a

vehicle, so one day an officer turned to me and said, “All right, Neil, here’s 20 quid, go and buy some crack…” I’d had no training whatsoever in undercover work, but I accepted, heading off

to a dingy house to ask a fearsome local hard-man for some crack cocaine. For whatever reason I was entirely unfazed by the dangers, letting adrenaline slow everything down. Besides, I was

very young and inconspicuous looking, so could just pretend to be a student addict. A short time later I arrived back at the station with a scrunched up paper twist of crack; I’d done it,

and with no fuss at all. From that moment, I – and my superiors, who soon made a huge drugs bust in Derby as a direct result of my work – realised I could be a pretty useful asset behind

enemy lines. Over the course of the next decade I’d frequently be deployed undercover, at first for short one-day jobs but escalating to spending weeks and then months holding up a daily

pretence, before reporting back when I could to my support team nearby. There was rarely much of a disguise: pretending to be a drug addict doesn’t take a huge transformation, as it could

happen to anyone. I’d wear dirty clothes and mumble a lot, or sometimes really lose it to show my desperation. Sticking to a ‘back story’ was easy, too. Movies and TV shows place a lot of

emphasis on having totally new identities, but I was often a scraggy student, or someone who’d just moved to the town. If you overthink or crumble to pressure, though, you’ll start

unnaturally telling people detailed things from your life – and that’s a dead giveaway. Drug addicts and dealers know nothing about one another, they just want a sale. Often they won’t even

know a name, so that lends itself to undercover work pretty neatly. I enjoyed it, but there were severe downsides, not least the loneliness. Straight after that first undercover job I was

told I wouldn’t be able to reveal the details of my work to anyone: not my family, my friends or my colleagues ­– all of whom could blab to the wrong person and place me in serious danger. I

married my girlfriend, Sam, in 1993 and we had two children together shortly afterwards, but they all had to be kept in the dark about what I was up to on shift. I couldn’t even tell them

when I’d won award for my work. That secrecy – coupled with the hard working, hard playing lifestyle of the Drugs Squad and the fact it would take me weeks to fully readjust after a job –

meant my marriage was permanently strained, eventually breaking up. Still, I was very good at what I did, so I stuck to it. There weren’t many undercover cops in the 90s, so I’d be dropped

into towns and cities all over the country, from Brighton to Leeds, wherever they needed someone on the ground and for however long it took to get results. I once worked out that I’ve been

responsible for putting people behind bars for a combined total of over 1,000 years. I can’t say why I was particularly suited to undercover work, but I had empathy with a lot of the people

I was encountering, many of whom were just problematic drug users in need of help rather than hardened criminals needing punishment. I was there to shop them, though, and incrementally it

dawned on me that the policing of drugs was only giving more and more power to the gangs in charge of supply. Those criminals operate through intimidating communities into silence, and

having officers (not to mention the inevitable backup car parked nearby, too) only made the violence needed to keep rule worse. Policing that sort of activity is the equivalent of using

plasters to mend a broken spine: only a total upheaval of drugs policy, including legalisation to take power from the gangs, will make any difference now. Things did get violent during my

experiences around those people, of course, but my temperament meant I could act calmly when things got out of hand – and they often did. I faced samurai swords, had knives put against my

groin, and was assaulted countless times. Some of those instances haunted me for years to come. I was even caught once, too. Wearing a wire on a job in Derby – and not a miniature James

Bond-style wire but a clunky buttonhole camera – a dealer’s thug pushed me up against a wall and found the device, immediately letting his friends know. Kicking up a protest, I managed to

buy enough time to calm the situation, buy my drugs and run off, but not before they’d tried to run me over. Just weeks before that, another undercover officer had been identified and beaten

to a pulp, so my escape was impossibly lucky. I had to keep my wits about me at all times, because you can’t trust anybody undercover, least of all your fellow officers. Corruption in the

police force was – and is – rife, and it’s almost all thanks to the obscene amounts of money in the drugs trade. With so much at stake there’s always going to be double agents, as I found

out. At a glance | Illegal drug classification In a team briefing during a huge job infiltrating the crime empire of Colin Gunn, a notorious Nottingham gangster in the early noughties, I

instantly took a dislike to an officer assigned to our team. He was shifty, so I asked my superior to take him off the job, which he did. When we eventually brought down Gunn in 2004, that

very officer was revealed to have been paid £2000 a month for seven years by the gangs to go through police training and work his way up to CID with a clean record, feeding information back.

Everybody – from the forces themselves all the way to the Home Office – knows goes on, but it’s impossible to protect against. With those kind of internal issues, the support structure

around me when things got difficult was almost non-existent. When I stopped undercover work in 2007, symptoms of post-traumatic stress (PTSD) hit me hard. I had nightmares, flashbacks and an

overwhelming guilt at some of the things I’d had to do. I stayed in the police, promoted to Detective Sergeant, until 2011, and eventually managed to get therapy to help my PTSD. I’ve now

left the force and work as a campaigner for legalising drugs as Chairman of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition UK. I’ve also married again, and lead a happier, more balanced life than I

ever had in my twenties. I don’t regret taking that first undercover job. I just wish I’d had the knowledge and confidence to present my findings to the right people, rather than

exacerbating the problem of drugs by keeping my head down. What I definitely do regret, however, are all the lives of vulnerable people that I made infinitely more unbearable through my

work. Undercover policing should only be used as a very last resort, and the ongoing Pitchford Enquiry into ethics within the practice – started by the allegations that scores of undercover

officers infiltrating campaign groups in the 1970s and 80s had relationships with women that didn’t know of their true identities – shows just what damage can be done when it is overused.

That was never a threat for me, with the sort of information I was trying to gather, but it shows just what can happen when undercover policing is overused. As I found out the hard way,

going behind enemy lines is dangerous for all concerned, not least for yourself. _GOOD COP, BAD WAR BY NEIL WOODS WITH JS RAFAELI (EBURY PRESS) IS OUT NOW_ _UKLEAP.ORG_