Whistleblower David Williams alleges his unit got rid of records to prevent Jenny Jones from discovering extent of its monitoring of her political activities

A police officer working for a secretive Scotland Yard intelligence unit that monitors thousands of political campaigners has alleged that police improperly destroyed files they had compiled on a Green party peer in a “highly irregular” cover-up.

Whistleblower Sgt David Williams said the unit got rid of the records to prevent Jenny Jones from discovering the extent of the police’s monitoring of her political activities. Lady Jones is also deputy chair of the committee that supervises the Metropolitan police.

In a personal letter to Jones, which Williams said he had written as a last resort, the officer said: “I didn’t become a police officer to monitor politicians or political parties, nor to pay casual disregard to policy and procedure.”

He said he believed that the police had failed to investigate his allegation properly.



“This letter to you may not be in my best interests but not sending it would be unconscionable for me. I fear it may initiate a series of escalating actions against me designed to discredit me or lead to my suspension from duty or my dismissal,” Williams added.

The Met said the records on Jones were destroyed as a part of a legitimate programme to improve its record-keeping. The force added that it did not happen “inappropriately”.

In the four-page letter, Williams also described his concerns about a series of other incidents that he alleged appeared to show a pattern of misconduct within the unit.

He alleged that this misconduct included the abrupt removal of an officer who had complained about racism, drunken behaviour, faking time records and apparent fraud.

Why did the police have files on my ‘domestic extremism’ in the first place? | Jenny Jones Read more

The Met dismissed these claims as either false, lacking in detail or because it said Williams had never raised them with his colleagues. The Met also disputed his claim that he had been victimised for speaking out.

Williams has worked for five years in the Met’s clandestine “domestic extremism” unit, which monitors protesters. The Met maintains that the unit is only concerned with keeping track of campaigners who commit crime to promote their political cause.

But police have been criticised for keeping files on protesters who, like Jones, have no criminal record, and recording trivial information, for example the sale of political literature and merchandise by an activist at the Glastonbury music festival.

Two years ago Jones used the Data Protection Act to obtain records showing how the police had kept a log of her political movements between 2001 and 2012. During the entire period she had been a member of the official committee scrutinising the Metropolitan police as a London councillor, and in 2012 she stood to be the capital’s mayor.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jenny Jones listens along with rival candidates Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson listen to the results of the London mayoral elections in 2012. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

The records she obtained consisted of 17 reports recording, for example, how she had spoken at public meetings about issues such as police violence and public spending cuts.

For some time afterwards, she complained to the Met and demanded to know who had authorised the monitoring, the justification for doing so, and whether it continued.

In June 2014 Jones had an official meeting with the unit as she continued to press for answers. According to Jones, officers from the unit said they were unable to say whether the file on her remained on the domestic extremism database.

In his letter to her, Williams described how that month he “saw three officers engaged in physically destroying a number of police records by shredding. I believe all of these records related to you. There were in excess of 30 reports.

“One of these officers then began to electronically delete a number of police records from a police database. Again, I believe these records related to you.”

But the officer could not delete the records, according to Williams, as two other officers were also trying to delete them at the same time.

Williams said that, also in a “highly irregular manner”, the records were deleted immediately without being retained on the unit’s back-up database. “This process would thwart any freedom of information request within a 28-day period from the initial deletion,” Williams wrote.

“Understandably the behaviour of these five officers caused me great concern as I believed this was a cover-up to ensure you could not get any access to police records relating to you through a freedom of information request.”

Williams said he reported his concern to the Met’s directorate of professional standards (DPS), the internal department responsible for investigating misconduct. Eight months later, the DPS told him it had been unable to find any evidence to corroborate his allegation and was going to close the matter.

But Williams said he persuaded the DPS to initiate a second investigation. According to the whistleblower, he detailed all his concerns about misconduct in the unit, but only his allegation about the destruction of Jones’s records appeared to have been investigated – a claim disputed by the Met.

He said senior officers held a meeting with one of the officers alleged to have been involved in destroying Jones’s records to discuss the issue. “This seemed highly irregular and seems to be similar to tipping off a suspect for a crime,” Williams wrote.

He said that in July last year he was told by the DPS that the second investigation had found that the destruction of the peer’s records had happened.



However, according to Williams, the DPS sent a report to Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Met commissioner, concluding that there had been no wrongdoing, although there had been “an issue of poor communication”. Another of Williams’s colleagues had reported the same incident, he added.

Williams told Jones that as he still had “serious reservations” about all his concerns, he had decided to write to her as he had exhausted all the Met’s internal procedures for raising alleged wrongdoing.



The Met said there was no evidence that there “had been any inappropriate destruction of documents” or that records had been destroyed in order to prevent them being released under freedom of information rules.

It added: “In fact the lead detective in the case, who spoke to all potential witnesses as part of their investigation, found that the unit was responding positively to demands to improve its document retention procedures by destroying information that it had no need to retain and that therefore should not be retained.”

Jones paid tribute to Williams, who she said “has tried to point out apparent wrongdoing within the intelligence unit where he works and is now facing dire personal consequences as a result.” She said it was worrying that the police could destroy files to “hide what they were keeping on me”.