‘Policing by deception’: Moral disengagement in undercover police officer accounts of deceptive sexual relationships

This article examines testimony given by male undercover police officers (UCOs) in the United Kingdom when asked to account for sexual misconduct and immoral behaviour during covert deployments. The ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) has heard evidence from former officers in the Special Demonstration Squad – a Metropolitan Police Special Branch unit in existence between 1968 and 2008 – about the long-term infiltration of political campaigns. Some UCOs used their cover identities to deceive women into serious, intimate relationships. The analysis presented here applies Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement to explore how officers justify their misconduct and deflect accountability. Through an examination of account-giving in the UCPI, the article identifies recurring patterns of moral justification, euphemistic labelling and advantageous comparisons. These are mechanisms of cognitive reconstrual of past behaviours, which are situated within a broader institutional police culture marked by misogyny, excessive secrecy and a lack of ethical boundaries.