Who Really Gets Stung? Some Issues Raised by the New Police Undercover Work

Abstract

In the last decade covert law enforcement has expanded in scale and changed in form. Factors responsible for this are briefly considered. The advantages and successes of recent undercover work have been well publicized. Yet the mere fact that a practice is legal should not be sufficient grounds for its use. Its ethical, practical, economic, and so cial implications must also be taken into account. Without denying the positive aspects of undercover work, the paper discusses some disadvantages, costs, and risks which have received inadequate public attention. These are discussed with respect to (1) targets of the in vestigation who may be subjected to trickery, coercion, excessive temptation, and political targeting, (2) undercover police work, which may cause police severe stress, entail lack of supervision, and present police with unique opportunities for corruption, (3) informers, the weakest link in the system, who may exploit their undercover role in a variety of ways, (4) third parties victimized as a result of undercover operations, and (5) the potential of undercover work to contribute unintentionally to crime, through such factors as generation of a mar ket or the provision of ideas, motives, or scarce resources. Recent undercover practices such as ABSCAM and police-run fenc ing fronts may be portents of a subtle and perhaps irreversible change in how social control is carried out. It is important to reflect on wheth er this is the direction in which we wish to see our society move.