LONDON LIVES: The police paparazzi

A back street in the East End, any given Tuesday evening. Passers- by are bewildered to see a vanload of uniformed police standing around, with a police photographer snapping away at people coming in and out of the building opposite. The plod paparazzi are out in force again tonight. They're not lying in wait for Posh or Becks though, they're snapping comparative nonentities who are something to do with Mayday, Reclaim the Streets or, more recently, the protests against the arms fair in Docklands.

The police had been photographing me like this every couple of months - since 1999, even though I have no criminal record. The legal basis of the police taking photos of me is the same defence used by the paparazzi to snap celebrities - you can't stop someone photographing you in a public place.

The Met claim they have only one photograph of me, taken in January 2002 by a civilian photographer hired to work with a Met Forward Intelligence Team - or "FIT". I was able to obtain a copy of my photo thanks to the Data Protection Act, which allows me to make a "Subject Access Request" to any organisation that I believe holds data on me, as long as I can prove my identity and send them a tenner. I sent the Met a detailed three- page summary of the dates and times I had been snapped, what I was wearing, and the shoulder numbers of the officers present.

The stars of the Met's FIT teams are their hired civilian photographers in black baseball caps and black jackets emblazoned with "Police Photographer". They use the latest SLR film camera with a digital camera clamped to the side, presumably for more efficient electronic archiving of images.

The FIT team's proper policemen - as well as protecting their civilian photographers - also take extensive notes in their notebooks. They appear to be interested in activists' "relationships" - who is greeting or conferring with whom. A rumour in activist circles says that they have pictures identifying key "targets" stuck inside their hats.

There were numerous occasions when a flash bulb had gone off as I walked past the FIT team, so what had happened to the other photos? The Met told me that images that could "identify third parties" had been edited out, but they don't have to tell me whether or not any such images existed. Some "Crimint" (Criminal Intelligence) reports and photos may well have already been deleted after being reviewed annually in line with the Met's own guidelines, although it's up to them to decide their own criteria on retaining data.

The police eventually told me they had decided that my request for more photos "need not be complied with if the supply of information would involve disproportionate effort", and said they would not be bothering to look for any more of my data.

The police are known to use face-recognition software that can match 1,000 photographs a second to images held on a database. Far from being "disproportionate effort", it should have been an easy task to match my passport photo to any of their video footage or digitally archived photos that featured my face.

I complained to the Information Commissioner's (IC's) office, which enforces the Data Protection Act. The IC's office is displeased with the "disproportionate effort" excuse - one they hear a lot from the police. In the future, the Met may be forced to allow me to come to Scotland Yard and view my data in person.

It is becoming more difficult for the police and other agencies to maintain the "neither confirm nor deny" policy on the existence of personal files. When the Freedom of Information Act comes into force in 2005, it will give us the right "to be informed in writing by the public authority whether it holds information of the description specified in the request". There's an outside chance that new anti- stalking legislation could be applied against cops who persistently photograph or follow people, but it's untested against the police and would be expensive to apply.

Police Magazine of November 1998 noted that "photographs are frequently used ... before, at and during public-order demonstrations which may result in disorder." But intelligence gathered through FIT teams rarely surfaces in court and has contributed to few arrests, let alone charges or convictions.

Why, then, does the Met bother? The targets speculate that the real purpose of such high-profile surveillance is a crude Scooby Doo tactic - to scare people away - not difficult, given how paranoid and camera- shy many anti-capitalist activists are. Another possibility is that it's an attempt to discourage pub landlords from allowing such groups to use their venues, or to alarm local communities. But most locals just react with curiosity or bewilderment; one old geezer in Camberwell's White Horse pub remarked that his crime-ridden area hardly saw any police patrols there, and then there's a Mayday meeting and a couple of police inspectors are standing outside all evening.

On 21 December last year - the busiest shopping day of 2002 and tipped as the most likely date for a terrorist strike on London - a FIT team was on Oxford Street, with not one but two photographers, snapping at activists holding a kind of anti-capitalist jumble sale where everything was free. The police noted that I "was taking notes of officers' shoulder numbers".