Undercover police inquiry hears that Met stopped disclosure of spying on Lawrence family
source: The Justice Gap
published: 8 December 2025
Image Credit: Pexels/Duda at www.pexels.com
Senior Metropolitan Police officers stopped an undercover officer from revealing to the Macpherson public inquiry that the force had spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence during the 1990s, according to evidence heard by the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
Peter Francis, a former undercover officer in the Met’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), said he had ‘hostile and heated’ exchanges with senior managers after insisting the Macpherson panel should be told about the surveillance. He said he was warned that the consequences for him ‘would be bad’ if he continued to push the point.
Francis, who went public in 2013, told the inquiry that collecting intelligence on the Lawrence family and black justice campaigns became a central focus of his deployment. He alleged that a senior officer instructed him to gather anything that could be used to undermine the family’s campaign – a claim denied by the Met. Members of the Macpherson panel have previously said they received no briefing about undercover policing around the inquiry.
The inquiry also heard evidence about long-running SDS practices, including the use of the identities of deceased children for cover purposes. Francis said it was ‘standard practice’ to adopt a dead child’s identity and recalled being instructed to trawl graveyards for suitable names.
Officers routinely obtained birth and death certificates to support their identities, a practice that continued for almost three decades until records were digitised.
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