A Police Officer, A Filmmaker, and a Community on Trial: DI Harrison Returns

It is now four months since we raised concerns about Detective Inspector Mark Harrison of the National Wildlife Crime Unit lending the authority of his office to the Friends of the Dales' Eyes on the Skies campaign. At the time, we observed that a serving police officer delivering an hour-long prosecution brief against an unconvicted community, on a campaign group's webinar, raised serious questions about due process, fairness, and the proper limits of policing.

DI Harrison has now appeared again, this time in a filmed interview for Hen Harrier Action's Skydancer Day, shot by activist filmmaker Greta Santagata. The format is different. The content is the same. And the questions it raises are, if anything, more serious than the first time round.

Since When Was It a Police Officer's Job to Demand Cultural Change?

The most striking passage in the interview is not the by now familiar recitation of hot spots and tag stop-functions. It is this: "The biggest, biggest challenge is removing the drivers, is getting in and speaking with those people who are involved in the crime, making the crime socially unacceptable and removing their need, their desire, to have to commit the crimes."

A serving Detective Inspector is publicly stating that his job is to engineer cultural change within a lawful community. Not to investigate alleged offences. Not to gather evidence. Not to put suspects before the courts. To go in, speak with people he believes are involved in crime, and remake their values until the crime becomes "socially unacceptable" to them.

This is not policing. It is propaganda work, and it is being conducted by a man with a warrant card.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7JbcRPTyMU

The police in this country investigate alleged offences and present evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service. They do not have, and have never had, a constitutional licence to enter communities and reshape their culture according to a preferred set of social attitudes. The moment a police officer takes on that role, particularly in public, in front of a sympathetic activist audience, the lines between law enforcement and political campaigning have collapsed entirely.

Were a serving officer to announce that he intended to enter, say, an inner city community and make particular attitudes "socially unacceptable" until the relevant conduct stopped, the response would be immediate and rightly so. The shooting community apparently warrants no such protection.

Inference Dressed as Investigation

DI Harrison's hot spot methodology, which we have addressed before, has been refined for the Skydancer Day audience. He is now explicit that "we can't hide the data. We're not making this up. We might not be able to prove exactly who's pulling the trigger and who's committing the crime, but we can say crime's taking place here."

Pause on what is actually being said. A senior officer of the National Wildlife Crime Unit is acknowledging, on camera, that his team cannot prove who is committing the alleged crimes. He cannot prove how they are being committed. He cannot, in many cases, prove that a crime as such has occurred at all, because a satellite tag stop-function is not a body, and the technical reliability of the tags themselves remains contested. What he can do, apparently, is announce on activist platforms that "crime's taking place here" and direct the apparatus of state against the named locations on that basis.

This is the same trial-by-webinar pattern we identified in February. The locations are named, or close enough to named, that anyone with a map can identify the estates. The implications are unmissable. And the legal threshold that ordinarily separates "we believe a crime may have occurred" from "we are publicly stating that a crime has occurred" has been quietly stepped over, without the inconvenience of a courtroom, a defence, or a jury.

The presumption of innocence is not a procedural nicety. It is one of the foundations of the legal system DI Harrison serves. To treat it as an obstacle to be talked around on a YouTube broadcast is not minor.

The January 2024 Conjuring Trick

The Skydancer Day interview also contains what is being presented as the headline finding: "not a single crime involving a satellite-tagged hen harrier on a hot spot since January 2024."

This is offered, and will be received, as proof that the NWCU's enforcement model is working. Look more carefully and it is something else entirely. It is a claim that no crime has been recorded against the very narrow population of satellite-tagged birds in the very specific locations the unit chose to designate as hot spots, in the period since the unit started visiting them. DI Harrison himself admits the limitation a moment later: "intelligence says they're targeting the untagged birds." Which is to say, the evidence base for the "no crime" claim is the absence of evidence in the only places and species the unit can actually monitor.

This is not a demonstration that enforcement is working. It is a demonstration that you can produce any deterrence statistic you like if you choose narrow enough parameters and a recent enough start date. A statistician would call it selection on the dependent variable. A police officer presenting it as proof of cultural change should expect to be asked harder questions.

DI Harrison's call for "more eyes and ears on the ground" through Operation Owl deserves particular scrutiny. Cast in the language of "neighbourhood watch for remote locations," it is in fact an open invitation for walkers, birdwatchers and visitors to record, photograph and film people going about lawful work on private land, and to forward that material to the police.

There is no neighbourhood watch in this country that asks members of the public to film identified individuals at their workplaces on suspicion of unspecified conduct, then submit the footage to a specialist unit publicly committed to remaking the suspect community's culture. There is something else that does that, and it has historically not gone well wherever it has been tried.

The shooting community is not a national security threat. Its members are not engaged in organised crime. They are gamekeepers, estate workers, farmers and contractors doing some of the most demanding work in the British countryside, often in conditions urban officers would find unrecognisable. To recruit the visiting public as a network of informers against them, while a Detective Inspector talks publicly about embedding covert human intelligence sources within their workplaces, is a profound inversion of how policing in a free society is supposed to work.

Four months ago, we noted that DI Harrison had appeared on a campaign platform that was, in effect, an RSPB front. He has now appeared on another, this time hosted by an organisation whose annual flagship event is explicitly a celebration of the case against driven grouse shooting. The filmmaker is a campaigner. The audience is a campaign. The framing is, from start to finish, a campaign.

A serving senior police officer with operational responsibility for wildlife crime investigations has now chosen, twice in four months, to deliver his findings, his interpretations and his calls for cultural change from platforms run by the campaigning opposition to a lawful industry. He has not, to our knowledge, accepted equivalent platforms hosted by the community he is investigating. He has not subjected his hot spot methodology to independent technical scrutiny. He has not explained why allegations of organised criminality, accompanied by talk of asset seizure and covert operatives, have produced so few charges and fewer still convictions.

The pattern is now established. It is no longer reasonable to treat it as an unfortunate one-off, or as the misjudged enthusiasm of an officer who has spent too much time with one side of the argument. It is what the NWCU's public-facing posture on grouse moors now looks like.

The shooting community has every right to ask, politely and persistently, why. So does anyone else who believes that the police should investigate alleged crimes through proper process, not announce them through activist webinars; that the presumption of innocence should apply in the uplands as it does elsewhere; and that the job of remaking a community's culture, if it falls to anyone, falls to that community itself, not to a Detective Inspector with a microphone.