Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (20th Century Fund) [Paperback]

Gary T. Marx (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520069692 | ISBN-13: 978-0520069695 | Publication Date: December 5, 1989

Providing a rich picture of past and present undercover work, and drawing on unpublished documents and interviews with the FBI and local police, this penetrating study examines the variety of undercover operations and the ethical issues and empirical assumptions raised when the state officially sanctions deception and trickery and allows its agents to participate in crime.

Editorial Reviews

Review

...[a] thoughtful, carefully reasoned, and well-organized survey of the problems and opportunities attendant on undercover operations.... Marx's rigorously analyzed monograph constitutes an important contribution relevant to a current national policy debate. -- American Political Science Review, A. Theoharis

...a Herculean effort to promulgate almost all that is currently known about the structure and operations of the emerging forms of undercover work.... Just as his earlier study on agents provocateurs and informants has become a landmark on police undercover work in political movements, this latest treatise should also become a landmark on police undercover work directed at criminal activities. -- Criminal Justice Review

A balanced, readable and cogent analysis that convincingly portrays the promises and problems of covert methods. The book has the twin virtues of verisimilitude and realpolitik and sharply etches the issues. I am enormously impressed and have never encountered as comprehensive or knowing a work.... [it] deserves a wide audience beyond practitioners and scholars. -- A. Bouza, Chief of Police, Minneapolis

A book that ... exudes a sustained and original genius. -- London Times, R. Jeffrey-Jones

Bravo! Gary Marx has written a lucid and sober book.... a terrific book, hard to put down once one begins to read it. Absolutely must-reading for those studying social control processes. -- Federal Probation, D. Milovanovic

Gary Marx's excellent new book ... raises the most delicate questions about what values are being upheld in law enforcement, and what government powers we are prepared to create in the process.... Undercover shines a strong, unflinching light on the full array of human and political consequences that ensue when law-enforcement resorts to masquerade. -- Dissent, Jim Rule

If you believe in undercover tactics, this book will warn you. If you are opposed to covert activities by the police, this excellent study will force you to rethink your position.... Undercover is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the threat, but also the usefulness, of surveillance by law enforcement officials. -- Father R. Drinan, Georgetown University

Marx can be credited with providing an informative, thoughtful and well-documented analysis of an important and neglected area of research. -- Social Science Quarterly, D. Hawkins

Marx's book provides a comprehensive and well-balanced analysis of the problem.... the crystal clear construction and literary style make it a pleasure to read.... [a] marvelous book. -- Police and Society, C. Fijnaut

From the Inside Flap

"This is the most comprehensive and thoughtful work ever done on undercover policing. It will be the benchmark by which all further scholarship in this area will be judged."--Jerome Skolnick, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law

"If you believe in undercover tactics, this book will warn you. If you are opposed to covert activities by the police, this excellent study will force you to rethink your position. . . . Undercover is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the threat, but also the usefulness, of surveillance by law enforcement officials."--R. Drinan, Georgetown University

"Gary Marx's book is one of the best of the rare species, thoughtful and analytic books about police surveillance. He has a thousand stories, most of them current . . . and he makes a solid study out of them. He has written a sociological map for surveillance, giving it a structure that it has never before had."--P. Chevigny, New York University

"This is the best single treatment of the problem of undercover investigations in our literature. Gary Marx writes not only with erudition and sensitivity, he is a very sensible man as well. He has mastered a vast amount of detail while not losing sight of the big picture. I cannot praise this book too highly."--J. Kaplan, Stanford University

"A tour de force on a very difficult subject. . . . This is an important, needed, well-executed book. It will be widely read and used."--D. Bayley, State University of New York, Albany

"A remarkable success at weaving legal and sociological factors in an otherwise controversial and seemingly irreconcilable interplay of disciplines."--J. Wilczynski, Prosecutor's Brief

"A wonderful book!"--Professor Arthur Miller, C-NBC Live

"Deserves a wide audience beyond practitioners and scholars."--A. Bouza, Chief of Police, Minneapolis

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (December 5, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520069692
• ISBN-13: 978-0520069695
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,026,603 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Comprehensive Analysis of Undercover Policing, June 6, 2006

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CS (Tempe, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (20th Century Fund) (Paperback)

Under Cover: Police Surveillance in America (1988)
Gary T. Marx

This book is written for both the scholar and the criminal justice practitioner and should be read by both. Although written nearly 20 years ago, this text still remains largely relevant to today's issues concerning law enforcement tactics of surveillance. The task of this book is to present the reader with an empirical assessment of a growing and emergent form of social control in America; undercover operations conducted by both formal and informal agents of social control. The text approaches the subject of surveillance from a critical albeit broad spectrum, choosing to spotlight both the potential positive and negative consequences of covert police action.

Marx traces the history of undercover police practices and the resultant development of police organizations such as the FBI, DEA, etc., as well as their existent roles in society (surprisingly, this remains relatively unexplored) as well as the increase of undercover police work by offering the reader a very detailed account of recent and developing changes in the area, which Marx argues among other things tends to be scattered, invisible, involuntary, covert and deceptive. The latter of which is sometimes viewed as problematic because lying violates trust, which is central to relationships and the whole of civil society.

The account of the development of undercover police work offered here continues to remain virtually unparalleled. Marx leaves no stone unturned, from the Western Frontier, to the development of private and federal police, to the emergence Bureau of Investigation (e.g. FBI), as established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. In explicating the development of undercover practices, Marx posits that indeed whenever undercover means are employed, problems are likely to appear, however we should be careful not dismiss undercover police work so disparagingly.

The remainder of the book reminds us that certain understandings associated with undercover police work (e.g. scandal, corruption, etc.) should not be held as fundamental toward all undercover police work. Indeed, changing crime patterns often facilitate the need for undercover police work. Nevertheless, privacy advocates continue to remain skeptical of such claims. Marx fully fleshes out both sides of these arguments; giving full credence to neither, but rather seeks to outline the types and dimensions of undercover police work, which are dependent upon contextual variations that collectively are useful for understanding different types of undercover operations, their appropriateness, usefulness, validity and consequences, and how these correspond with real world implications.

Marx provides an extensive review of the existent research literature (as well as his own research) to address the intended and unintended consequences of undercover work of police, suspects, informants, families, as well as non-participant third parties. Marx suggests that assumptions (negative or positive) about the nature of undercover police work at best are often questionable. In order to stabilize the unstructured nature of undercover police work, Marx offers some key policy implications on how to perhaps best control undercover operations so that their virtue remains democratic, avoiding certain pitfalls, namely the foreseeable decent toward a totalitarian state.

The book concludes with a telling account of what Marx calls the "new surveillance" (undercover police work is just one extension of this surveillance). For instance, Marx addresses the ways in which computers qualitatively change the nature of surveillance (e.g. "data mining"). The electronic nature of contemporary surveillance lends itself to other technologies such as visual and audio surveillance that collectively transcend traditional fixed barriers thereby undermining the principal spirit of the Fourth Amendment, "because the burden of proof is shifted from the state to the target of surveillance" (p. 227). However, Marx argues that the concern here is not all doom and gloom, but rather suggests that we should be critical of our current understanding of such technologies and how the proliferation of these emergent technologies simultaneously serve as a means for protecting and undermining our most cherished values. All in all this book presents a very comprehensive analysis of undercover policing and should be read by anyone interested in police work, sociology, criminology, political science, and the law.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY:
Random House.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.