Relocated some images from a show on Hanway Street, Soho around 2023. The show was titled SDS, after the Special Demonstration Squad & depicted various undercover police officers in costume or masked. One of the final portraits depicted the notable poster boy, Mark Kennedy/Mark Flash/Mark Stone in which he disclosed the workings of the SDS & it’s concluding years with his PR agent Max Clifford (Daily Mail) in 2010. He noted he he suffered a version of Stockholm syndrome & sued the police for ruining his life and failing to “protect” him from “falling in love” with one of the environmental activists whose movement he infiltrated. His infiltrations extended to Dissent!, Workers Solidarity Movement & Climate Action.
Kennedy was recruited in 2002 by the Met’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit. He left school at 16, worked as a court usher and joined the City of London Police in 1990, aged 21. In the early Nineties he was a uniformed member of the ‘Ring of Steel’ around the City of London. He transferred to the Metropolitan Police and in 1996 was recruited to his first undercover course on street-level drug dealing. ‘I was a natural at undercover work and I loved it. Drug work was black and white. You identify the bad guys, record and film the evidence, present it in court and take them down. I did that for four years and loved it.’ He was exposed as a police officer in October 2010 and in January 2011 after wide media coverage he went public with his story in a Mail on Sunday interview. The Daily Mail article, in Mark’s words, reveals that:
Each undercover officer cost £250,000 a year in wages, overtime, cost of transport and housing. Every day I was on the job, even if I was at ‘home’ in bed watching telly and doing the laundry, I got five hours’ overtime. My handler got the same overtime. When I was actively involved in operations I would get the maximum, which was 14 hours of overtime on top of my eight-hour working day. They paid me for 22 hours of work which was the maximum I could claim in a 24-hour period. This could go on for weeks. My handler, or cover officer, would get the same.
