The Guardian revealed that undercover officers from London have been using the identities of at least 80 dead children in undercover operations for decades. London’s Metropolitan Police Service issued fake passports to spies and instructed them to memorize the infants’ names and medical details.

The classified practice was introduced 40 years ago when police attempted to infiltrate radical groups protesting the economic climate in London. Dead children’s identities were the chosen method due to the authenticity of birth records and the minimal paper trail attached to their brief lifetimes.

“I truly understand the need for undercover officers,” said an anonymous Greensboro police department officer to The Guilfordian. “However, there are better ways to fake an identity.”

Now Met police chiefs admit that a second spy unit utilized dead children’s names and information in a second round of undercover operations. In 2003, undercover spies implemented this practice again, again without the consent of the dead children’s parents.

Assistant Professor of Justice and Policy Studies Sanjay Marwah said there is no question that this method of false identification is an invasion of the right of the deceased children’s families.

Pete Black, an officer who went undercover in the ‘90s with the fake persona of London child, told the Guardian that Special Demonstration Squad officers visited the houses where the children once lived to learn every aspect of the officers’ new identities.

SDS undercover officer John Dines’s experience exemplifies one risk of parents being unaware of the practice.

Dines had a two-year relationship with a woman while undercover and then disappeared when his duty was completed. The woman attempted to track him down and located the family of the deceased boy, mistaking the identity of the boy’s family with the actual Dines family.

“The government can create any identity they want to … so they don’t need to steal real people’s identities, which can cause a lot of issues,” Glyn Haugh, a British citizen living in Greensboro told The Guilfordian. “These are special operations, and they have to be approved by the Home Office and shouldn’t be an everyday police force.”

Some of the police spies spent up to 10 years pretending to be deceased people, according to the Guardian.

“I have seen the method of having a fake driver’s license issued that is a fake name, fake date of birth, and address that is a random vacant lot or field in another town,” said the anonymous Greensboro police department officer to The Guilfordian. “But the method of using a deceased child is unheard of. I do not think many U.S. departments would do this.”

An unidentified Met police spy who adopted the identity of a child killed in a car crash told the Guardian the practice is justifiable as it is for the “greater good.”

“The investigation in terms of what was really the greater good is not made clear at all,” Marwah said. “Maybe the police feel that they don’t have to make that clear, but I think it’s imperative for them to make that clear.”