Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.