An undercover police unit once called a "jewel in the crown" of Scotland Yard had to be shut down because it spied on people without good reason and was badly run, a public inquiry heard on 2 August 2026. Jon Boutcher, the senior officer who took over responsibility for the unit, told the inquiry he decided within months that it had to be closed "pretty quickly" The Guardian.

The unit was called the Special Demonstration Squad, or SDS. It was part of Scotland Yard, which is the headquarters of London's police. At the time, Boutcher was a senior detective in the counter-terrorist division. He is now the chief constable, or top officer, of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. At the inquiry, he is identified by the code HN773.

Boutcher said most of the groups the SDS spied on "posed no threat to public order, let alone democracy." Those targeted included pro-Palestinian supporters, leftwing groups, environment groups, the Socialist Workers party, and campaigns against racism. He suspected the SDS was gathering an "extremely limited" amount of useful information. He asked the unit to list its successes over the previous five years. The responses did not change his mind.

At the same time, very few undercover officers were being sent to infiltrate terrorist groups, even though society faced what Boutcher called "an increasing and enduring threat from international terrorism." This mismatch, between what the SDS was actually doing and what it should have been doing, was central to his decision to close the unit.

Boutcher, with the agreement of his superiors, shut down the SDS in what he called "quite a groundbreaking" decision. The unit had been running secret operations for 40 years. In its final days, the inquiry heard, a "toxic" atmosphere existed between the SDS and more senior Scotland Yard ranks. Boutcher said the SDS mounted "almost like a rearguard action" to justify its existence, describing the unit's attitude as a "very much siege mentality in many ways."

The conduct of SDS officers went beyond targeting the wrong groups. Boutcher told the inquiry that the "abusive and inappropriate behaviour" of undercover officers had harmed members of the public. SDS officers routinely formed intimate relationships with women they were spying on, without revealing their true identities. Boutcher described this as the "sexual abuse of many vulnerable women by some SDS operatives" and said it had caused "incalculable and intolerable harm."

He also said the SDS should never have spied on grieving families. He gave the example of the relatives of Jean Charles de Menezes, a man who was shot dead by police on the London Underground in 2005.

The inquiry, formally called the Undercover Policing Inquiry, is examining the conduct of 139 undercover officers in the SDS and another covert unit. These officers infiltrated mainly leftwing organisations between 1968 and at least 2010. The inquiry's Tranche 3 (Phase 3) hearings started on 15 June 2026, and it has published over 9,074 evidential documents so far.

The broader context here matters. The SDS was not a small, rogue unit operating on the edges of Scotland Yard. It had been praised by supporters within senior ranks as a "jewel in the crown." Boutcher's testimony makes clear that shutting it down required overcoming resistance from a unit that saw itself as essential and fought its own closure. The fact that the unit lasted four decades despite conducting surveillance that Boutcher now says was unjustified raises questions about the oversight structures, or the lack of them, that allowed it to operate without being checked for so long.

There is also a resource-allocation dimension. Boutcher's observation that counter-terrorism resources were being diverted away from infiltrating genuine terrorist threats toward spying on peaceful political groups is not just a historical curiosity. It is an admission that the unit's misdirected focus may have come at a cost, during a period when international terrorism posed what he called an "enduring" threat. For policing scholars and oversight professionals, that tradeoff is among the most consequential findings to emerge from the inquiry.

Boutcher's current role as chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland adds another layer. In May 2024, the BBC reported that Boutcher said he would not "speculate" over alleged journalist surveillance by the PSNI, and that a court was dealing with allegations the PSNI acted unlawfully in relation to surveillance of journalists. He was also due to meet the Policing Board leadership over the matter. Those allegations predate his spycops testimony but sit in the same institutional landscape: a senior officer who disbanded one covert unit for unjustified surveillance now heads a police service facing its own surveillance-related legal proceedings.

The inquiry continues.