Confessions of an Undercover Cop. Ash Cameron

       Who’s there?

      When I joined the surveillance team I found that undercover work is 90 per cent boredom and 2 per cent action. But, oh, what action! The other bits of the job involved meetings, briefings and admin. We did a lot of sitting around in cars. We would sit up in buildings, on park benches, and traipse and trawl the streets. Occasionally we had to mingle, mix with suspects, and pretend to be someone we weren’t. It was a bit like acting, but not at all like it’s portrayed on the screen. It was also dangerous and addictive and far from a nine-to-five job, or foot patrol.

      Surveillance units function locally, regionally and nationally, often overlapping, working together on joint operations that include phone tapping, house bugging, following people and accessing information on suspects, as per RIPA and other legislation. Our job was to gather information, intelligence and evidence, to find out what we could about suspects, the things they did and who they mixed with, and also to build up a profile of them. Sometimes we’d be given dossiers on criminals and we had to do the rest of the legwork, tracing and tracking them and monitoring their every move. We didn’t often get in on the arrests, either. We would assist these bigger inquiries and investigations and pass the information back to source once the objectives were achieved. We also worked on our own cases. And although it could be monotonous, trailing someone who didn’t do much for hours, you always had to keep sharp. A foot wrong and cover would be blown; you’d lose the whole thing, making it a costly and botched operation.

      A lot of long hours are spent working closely with colleagues of the opposite sex. You’re in situations where you have to depend on each other entirely and trust is essential. It’s not unusual to form close friendships that, even if innocent, threaten personal relationships. The unpredictable lifestyle, having to drop everything to go off on a job, not knowing when you’ll return, can be a strain. I was fortunate, I suppose, that during my years working undercover and in plain clothes, I didn’t live with a partner.