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UNDERCOVER TALES

First Going Undercover

The night before I began my first long-term undercover assignment, my nerves were tangled. Since then I’ve never felt as frightened as I felt that night. I felt so worried that I was somehow numbed, distanced from myself and what was in front of me. After all, someone taking up secret cameras could prevent harm, but they could also be caught and reprimanded, or even worse. It is always a nerve-wracking experience.

I was going to begin working inside an animal sanctuary the next morning, while also covertly filming. I would have to go about my business as a volunteer sweeping out bird poo from cages and feeding animals, but I would also be secretly filming some of the people around me, without them realising. Our aim was to expose evidence that some people were mistreating animals and even killing healthy birds.1

It was a warm spring night. I was just 24 years old. I had driven my more-rusty-than-red second-hand car over to my then-girlfriend’s house. I needed to be somewhere quiet, I needed to not talk. I was trying to avoid thinking too much. Really, I was hoping that I would not screw up and that my head would not explode with worry.

I shut the curtains of her Dorset bungalow’s front room. I pushed the tablecloth back off the dining table and put down a hard suitcase, a moulded-plastic black box with a handle. My girlfriend walked in asking why her house was pitch black while the sun was still out. I was just worried that the retired – and nosey – neighbours would look in and see the camera.

I unfastened the clasps on the box and opened the lid. Inside was a secret camera. The main piece was just an ordinary big and bulky handicam, the type of camera a tourist might carry, but it also had a black cable attached to it. That black lead was the clever bit: it ran to a miniature camera lens. That lens was hidden in a T-shirt such that it could point out and film from my chest without anyone realising.

It was exciting but foreign and slightly unbelievable. Could I really get away with wearing this big thing?

Would no one realise I was filming them? Really?

I took out the camera, carefully handling its leads and strapping them on. I taped down any spare extension to my chest and tried not to think about the tape ripping off my chest hairs when I finished my day’s work.

Check the whole thing is hidden.

Check the camera is working 16 times more before you leave the room.

Come back into the room and check again.

Breathe. Relax. Remember the rules. Remember the lies you told last time.

It is a fear that never goes away. It comes with a pulse of adrenaline. When you are using a secret camera, it becomes an inescapable presence in everything you do, whether you are wearing it or leaving it in a room. You do not just switch on the camera. It is a two-way street. While the secret camera is there, you are aware of it, you think of it – you are switched on too.

Looking in the mirror, every bulge and every bump is so obvious it screams out, ‘Hey, this guy is an undercover reporter!’ You sweat. Then you go in…to try to change things.

In the years since then, cameras have become miniaturised and much cheaper. The little cottage industry I worked in, where journalists were doing most of the covert recording that ended up in newspapers and on televisions, has been swept away or at least lost its importance.

Journalists still use hidden cameras, but members of the public are now recording most of the secret footage that is being broadcast in news reports every week all over the world.

It appears my breed, the journalists and professionals, is passing the baton to ordinary people.

THE TRANSITION FROM UNDERCOVER REPORTER TO UNDERCOVER PRODUCER

During the course of a dozen investigations, I captured evidence of antisocial or illegal behaviour by wearing secret recording equipment. The footage I personally filmed was broadcast on national or local television in the UK, mainly at the BBC. Then, about ten years ago, I hung up my secret camera and began managing other undercover reporters.

One of those journalists was Joe Casey, a Kilkenny-born but West London-raised Irishman, proud of his heritage and determined to have a positive influence on the world. He is gifted with a strong heart. He is passionate about doing good for others.

I hired Joe to work undercover, to wear cameras and infiltrate a private hospital on the outskirts of Bristol which was supposed to care for vulnerable people with learning disabilities or autism and challenging behaviour. That hospital was Winterbourne View.

During just 14 shifts undercover on the top floor of that hospital, Joe filmed patients being slapped, goaded, kicked and tormented by some of the people who were paid to care for them.

Unusually (and usefully for us), Joe’s sense of social duty is hidden by a tough exterior: unless he deliberately lets on, it is very easy to assume he is ‘one of the boys’. When Joe went undercover, pretending to be just another care worker, none of the people around him got any hint he was concerned about anything. Although he endured some of the most difficult and challenging experiences any undercover reporter has faced, to onlookers at the hospital he looked like any other careless guy more worried about his day off than what was going on.

Everyone around him thought that he was ‘one of them’.

To keep down costs, I had rented an unfurnished house. Joe and I slept on mattresses on the floor. I borrowed chairs from the landlady. With a folding chair each, in the evening we would quickly eat the food I had prepared, plates on our laps, living like ascetics and avoiding the neighbours – our lives focused entirely on the evidence we were gathering.

After every 12-hour shift working at Winterbourne View Hospital, Joe still had another several hours of work to do, just to download, back up and review the footage he had filmed, to make notes on what he had seen and to film video diaries.

Although my duty was less ‘glamorous’, less important and less dangerous, I had more than a day’s work between each of his shifts at the hospital, just watching everything, checking every frame and ensuring we knew exactly what he was seeing but also what he was doing, so that I could provide constant feedback.

It was an intense and surreal existence for both of us.

Looking back, I think that intensity distanced us from what we were seeing in a way that made the investigation possible. The horrors that were unfolding in front of me on my laptop were of a pace and severity that could have been intolerable for a two-man team with no relief.2

A Minister of State in the Department of Health, Norman Lamb MP (Member of Parliament), told the British Parliament:

The scandal that unfolded at Winterbourne View was devastating. We were all rightly shocked, angered and dismayed by the appalling abuse uncovered by the Panorama programme in May 2011…

The abuse at Winterbourne View was criminal. Staff whose job was to care for people instead routinely mistreated and abused them. Management allowed a culture of abuse to flourish. Warning signs were not picked up by health or local authorities, the residents’ families were not listened to, and the concerns raised by a whistleblower went unheeded. The fact that it took a television documentary to raise the alarm speaks volumes.3

That hospital was licensed to provide only assessment and treatment. Instead of fulfilling that purpose, many of the patients ended up languishing there for years. Particularly on the top floor, Winterbourne View had become a place where vulnerable people were not assessed and not treated – just incarcerated and, sometimes, mistreated terribly. I later wrote the following about the film captured by Joe:

None of this abuse and mistreatment would have been revealed were it not for events back in 2011, when I drove down with Joe Casey – our undercover reporter who actually worked at Winterbourne View Hospital – to start work. I was there to manage him, manage the investigation and to keep an eye on his footage.

The hospital was shut as a result of our investigation. Eleven people were convicted for crimes of neglect or common assault. Since that film, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 has been enacted. That Act created new offences of corporate neglect and corporate ill treatment – we are told that it could (if enforced) mean owners and providers are prosecuted for failings in their institutions.

Secret filming can lift whole houses off the ground. It can prevent harm, and it can be good.

NOTES

1.See BBC Inside Out (2003) ‘Animal sanctuary exposed.’ Available at www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/south/series3/animal_sanctuary_exposed. shtml, accessed on 25 April 2015. At the time of broadcast, the owner denied the allegations and said in a statement that the sanctuary had recently passed its zoo inspection and that this negates some of the allegations. However, the owner was later found guilty of wildlife offences; see BBC News (2004) ‘Owl boss pays for wildlife crime.’ Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/3719158.stm, accessed on 25 April 2015.

2.Plomin, J. (2013) ‘The abuse of vulnerable adults at Winterbourne View Hospital: the lessons to be learned.’ Journal of Adult Protection 15, 4, 182–191.

3.Lamb, N. (2012) ‘Statement on final report into Winterbourne View.’ Available at www.parliament.uk/business/news/2012/december/statement-on-final-report-into-winterbourne-view, accessed on 24 January 2015.