Comments on: Undercover UK cops infiltrated environmental groups, seduced women in the groups, fathered children with them, abandoned them

By: Emily Ravich

Emily Ravich — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:35:00 +0000

Can they sue the government for back child-support?

By: yobar

yobar — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:06:00 +0000

That’s what they have Officer Friendly for.

By: elix

elix — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:50:00 +0000

Uhhh… mdhatter03, apoxia is relating an anecdote about a man who was put in an undercover position for a year and as part of his cover had to go deep into alcohol and drug abuse… and once the assignment ended, he remained an alcoholic for decades without support from his employer. We’re not talking about the subject of the original BB news post (the UK officers who fathered children while working undercover and then disappeared from their lives) here.

I’m not defending those festering pustules one bit, but we’re not talking about them.

By: Fnordius

Fnordius — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:19:00 +0000

I disagree. His choice was based upon trust that he was both helping society and that the service would give him the support he needed. It is much more plausible that his choice was ill-informed, that his supers actually lied to him, tricked him into taking the undercover assignment. Remember, it wasn’t until the 1980′s that we began to hear about how stressful undercover work is and the long term damage it causes to those that do it, and training still is woefully inadequate.

Remember, a lot of undercover cops end up having to do the same drugs as those they have infiltrated, or else their cover is at risk of being blown. So he took choices that saved his immediate life, but he is still paying for it forty years later.

By: Guest

Guest — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:43:00 +0000

Yeah, except he took the job. He chose to fuck and impregnate women who believed he was someone else.

AT SOME POINT responsibility belongs to the person agreeing to do the inhuman thing, right?

evil is the rounding error, between right and best, if you see my meaning.

By: elix

elix — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:47:00 +0000

I’m going to disagree with you on the basis that if his job required him to get heavily into drugs and alcohol, and the result was decades of alcoholism that ruined a significant portion of his life, his employer has a responsibility to at least try to help him recover (assuming he actually informed them that because of his assignment he’d gotten hooked on the bottle). However, we don’t know enough of the details about if he tried to get help from work or if he kept it a secret and just suffered, or what.

By: elix

elix — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:42:00 +0000

Entirely possible. I guess sex and parenting is a touchy subject for some people.

By: Repurposed

Repurposed — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:15:00 +0000

They don’t screw around with ‘deep cover’ do they? No wait, they did.

By: SamSam

SamSam — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:13:00 +0000

In principle I agree with you, but as a general rule that doesn’t make any sense. If a man pretends he is richer than he truly is before having sex with someone, should that count as “rape?” If a man claims he’s friends with a famous rockstar before having sex with someone, should that count as “rape?” If a man uses rogaine to hide his bald spot before having sex with someone, should that count as “rape?”

I think making the hyperbolic claim that this is “rape” just gets us into these kinds of discussions, and ignores the true grossness of what they did.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:18:00 +0000

His choices.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:15:00 +0000

Yeah, and environmentalists are SUCH SECRET KEEPERS

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:15:00 +0000

One of these children will become Prime Minister.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:14:00 +0000

this story seems to be hitting close to home for a few people in this thread. Surprisingly illogical distractions for a BB thread. I think that’s what we see above?

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:13:00 +0000

Except of course, the fathers in this case work for the crown, which just adds a whole other level… and in a way explains a lot.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:09:00 +0000

These men deserve rotten fruit showers in public, daily, until people tire of them.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:08:00 +0000

I hate how correct you are. And you really are. This would have been better handled if the gov’t had somehow managed to let these families each win a lottery of some sort and just be handed the kind of compensation they deserve, without ever learning how HAD they were.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:06:00 +0000

I think it’s quaint that you can see this yet believe these men capable of love.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:05:00 +0000

nor can they make up for this stuff.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:04:00 +0000

I recommend that you open your own successful and widely read blog, and then distract people from discussing abuses of power over there. Give ‘em some competition, amirite?

By: waetherman

waetherman — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:04:00 +0000

Point taken.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Without getting too semantic, it is quite rapey.

By: Paul McGibboney

Paul McGibboney — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:30:00 +0000

With all respect, your explanation or analysis above is one of the very reasons most people shut down when it comes to trying to understand issues…after attorneys get through with it, nobody can comprehend it. As Bill Clinton said, “It all depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

By: Cliff

Cliff — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:13:00 +0000

There’s an interesting documentary about one of these guys

http://documentaryheaven.com/confessions-of-an-undercover-cop/

Sidenote: Derp

By: EH

EH — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:14:00 +0000

Tell you what, you get your students to find all the good cop stories they can find, submit it to BB, and maybe we’ll see what stacks up. Fair?

By: Marc Mielke

Marc Mielke — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 08:26:00 +0000

I want to be arrested by Zooey Deschanel.

By: Incipient Madness

Incipient Madness — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 01:37:00 +0000

If you think BB is getting you thinking that way, start reading “Dispatches From the Culture Wars” or Balko’s “The Agitator” .

By: elix

elix — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 01:12:00 +0000

I think you’re barking up the wrong tree here, bro. A single woman has far more free time and resources than a single mother; flip the genders and this sentence is still true.

autark is speculating that this might’ve been an intentional move of disruption. Kind of the long tail version of being an undercover instigator/agitator. I’m not sure how this is mysoginistic. Pessimistic, perhaps.

By: Steve Nordquist

Steve Nordquist — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:27:00 +0000

The police get to enforce States’ abuse of others’ authority too, practicing medicine often enough. bOING^2 has fewer hero police stories than FARK, but that helps that cause; you are not impressed into thinking the police will look heroic at every first-blush account.

Likewise stories about sex with environmentalists who turn around hung up on St. Thomas Aquinas’s ‘pro-life’ recidivism are rare here. If the agents were women, this would be 3 stories and their units KO’d by liability claims.

By: Gemma

Gemma — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:14:00 +0000

There was a strange case in Scotland recently of a woman being remanded into custody accused of obtaining sex by fraud because she tricked two women into thinking she was a man. (They don't go into details of methods, but in one case the sex occurred over many years.) I was actually shocked that this would be considered a crime, and that she wouldn't even be granted bail. I mean, if this was a woman choosing to live as a man, should she be obliged to tell anyone that? The charges were later dropped. [I'm basing my comments solely on these two articles, so for all I know there may be a lot more to this story than I understand.]

By: apoxia

apoxia — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:30:00 +0000

Thought I’d throw something into the mix. I had a client who was an undercover cop in his early 20s for one year, it was his first assignment. He was big time into drugs and alcohol as part of the work, and it really fucked him up. It cost him his first marriage and led to a few decades of alcohol abuse. I saw him in his 60s and the scars remained. It was a combination of poor training, poor supervision, and no support when his assignment ended. He certainly looked like a victim of the police service, rather than a perpetrator.