On Gary Marx's Undercover: Police Surveillance in America
Rule, James
UNDERCOVER: POLICE SURVEILLANCE IN AMERICA, by Gary T. Marx. Berkeley: University of California Press. A Twentieth Century Fund Book, 1988. xxv, 283 pp. $25.00. The trouble with undercover...
...In short, how bad are the bads, how good are the goods—and how can we create a legal and policy apparatus that applies such a reckoning consistently and evenhandedly...
...Gary Marx, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has published many studies of crime and policing, as well as of dissent and protest movements...
...The result was resignation from the force, several bank robberies, and a prison term...
...His first book, Protest and Prejudice, is among the most acute scholarly studies of the motives and attitudes fueling America's ghetto riots of the late 1960s...
...For many of us, undercover operations are easy to hate...
...But this came at a cost of heavy drug use, alcoholism, brawling, the breakup of his family, and his inability to fit back into routine police work after the investigation was over...
...Marx gives a case in point: Consider, for example, a northern California police officer who rode with the Hell's Angels for a year and a half...
...It is easy enough to say that controls are necessary and easier still to add that the importance of the results sought in such operations must be "balanced" against the evils and dangers that may attend them...
...Marx quotes E.L...
...A stronger approach would be to require court orders before undercover operations could be mounted...
...How, practically, are we to weigh the liabilities of having law-enforcers pose as prostitutes, drug traffickers, or motorcycle outlaws against the specific gains such strategies are supposed to offer...
...Corruption of the law itself, for another...
...Such reflections may convince many that undercover operations ought to be proscribed outright...
...A number of legal and policy directions are available...
...No one concerned about abuse of state power can fail to be alarmed by such accounts...
...Marx does not provide precise answers...
...As one reads Undercover, the tension between these two positions becomes increasingly vivid...
...These facts confer great discretion on those with the power to compile records and to shape their use...
...Some involve inciting public figures to accept pay for influence—as in the Abscam scandal...
...The trouble with undercover police operations, Gary Marx's excellent new book might lead us to conclude, is that they breed government waste: not waste of time or money so much as of human personality and integrity of the law itself...
...The agencies that mount such operations range from the local police to federal agencies, including the FBI...
...Yet this discussion leaves many questions unanswered...
...No doubt they must...
...SUMMER • 1989 • 407...
...What Undercover does do is to establish the bases from which such answers might evolve...
...under some circumstances, it appears, the dangers of renouncing them outweigh those of having them...
...Marx discusses these and several other modes of control...
...Officers, detectives, should be neatly dressed and easily identifiable...
...Others require police officers to impersonate prostitutes, drunks, and derelicts in hopes of encouraging SUMMER • 1989 • 405 Books passers-by to attempt illegal acts...
...In the opening pages of this book he describes his first direct encounter with undercover policing—the infiltration of a Berkeley Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) chapter in which he was involved by a police "plant," who disrupted the group's work and ultimately absconded with its funds...
...Corruption of the lives and personalities of those who carry them out, for one...
...No one likes the idea of being investigated...
...As far as I know, neither has anyone else...
...But this book pinpoints something crucial that the operations share—a tendency to render ambiguous the boundaries between "law enforcement" and the lawless activities they are supposed to curtail...
...Undercover shines a strong, unflinching light on the full array of human and political consequences that ensue when lawenforcement resorts to masquerade...
...The warrant procedure could require that those seeking to carry out the operations specify the nature of the suspected wrongdoing, the form to be taken by the undercover operation, the period over which it would be carried out, the persons likely to be affected, and why more conventional means would not suffice...
...Mayors in Seattle, Detroit, Houston, and other cities discovered after their elections that their predecessors had made them targets of police intelligence units...
...Not all undercover operations involve such flamboyant "cover" as membership in the Hell's Angels...
...So we breach the principle of categorically rejecting undercover operations...
...Like many sociologists of his generation, Marx's scholarly concerns grew out of personal engagement with the social issues of the 1960s...
...Yet if we look to government to protect individual rights and safety, how do we react to groups geared to subverting these things...
...Marx leaves no doubt of the evils that demand control by such procedures...
...Doctorow: I like my cops in uniforms with badge numbers I can read...
...The problem is, the notion of "balancing" is simply a metaphor here...
...He was responsible for a large number of arrests, including previously almost untouchable higher-level drug dealers...
...It gives no guidance for actually deciding how to set policy without some way of ascribing weights to the different values involved...
...What principles should guide these operations, and what legal and bureaucratic procedures offer hope of implementing such principles...
...Undercover operations spark revulsion when directed against what we consider innocent variations in life style and political preference...
...Yet Marx himself acknowledges a turn in his own convictions here...
...As with other privacyinvading tactics, such as electronic surveillance or access to confidential records, they may be carried out with no intention of formal prosecution...
...Undercover surveillance thus 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...
...I like police departments with budgets argued at public hearings...
...yet he reluctantly abandoned this view in the course of the research...
...How should governments respond to secret, paramilitary organizations that preach—and plan—the violent persecution of minorities...
...Some two decades later, he undertook this critical study of operations where law-enforcement agents present themselves as something they are not...
...Needless to say, lawenforcement authorities themselves have shown little enthusiasm for such requirements...
...Without means of penetrating conspir406 • DISSENT Books atonal groups, governments are apt to remain ineffectual...
...Witting or unwitting encouragement of the criminal activities ostensibly being combated is yet another...
...By pinpointing the subtlety and consequences of what is at stake, Gary Marx's book opens the possibility of intelligent debate over some deeply disturbing activities...
...We live in a world where everyone is expected to have "records" of various kinds, and where such records are constantly being reinterpreted in light of changing contexts...
...They tend to put arbitrary power in the hands of those least likely to use it wisely: Undercover means fit within a general conception of social control through threat...
...Damage to "innocent bystanders" by the illegal activities either feigned or encouraged by undercover operations is still another...
...Agencies ranging from the FBI to state and local police forces operate under such ground rules not just because of ethical concern but also to forestall legal action from victims of undercover operations and political backlash...
...He was praised for doing a "magnificent job...
...What response is appropriate to highly organized criminal industries that challenge the state in their use of violence and intimidation...
...He began work on this book, he says, believing that all undercover operations should be outlawed...
...Yet this more nuanced position is infinitely more difficult to put into effect than any categorical one...
...Warrants would then be issued strictly for the activities and the periods specified, with breaches treated as seriously as illegal wire taps or illegal searches...
...One common option is development of formal guidelines...
...Groups seeking police reform, such as the ACLU and other nonviolent organizations, were also targets of surveillance...
...And such alarm is well founded, given the special potency conferred by the capacity to amass "facts" of all kinds...
...Still others, as in the FBI's CISPES operations, involve surveillance and infiltration of grass-roots groups engaged in nothing more sinister than exercise of their First Amendment rights...
...But the stubborn question remains: What strategies, what procedures offer hope of combating such evils...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
