Abstract

Touching upon the issue in a necessarily highly limited way, the ethical considerations of police working undercover are examined. As many such activities are undertaken for the protection of the citizenry at large, and often at great personal risk to the officers involved, most people are comfortable with the morality of undercover work. It is usually only failure to achieve results that brings up ethical issues, and this in itself is a broader moral concern. Moreover, while undercover operations may be legally sanctioned, actions and decisions of officers must abide by the laws governing all societal interaction.

In Practice

By definition, ‘undercover’ work is engaged upon when the police officers conducting it do not reveal themselves to be police. As may be imagined, this may take on a wide variety of forms and occur in diverse circumstances. That said, it is usually acknowledged by both public and court that undercover work is ordered when substantial threats to public safety, or large-scale crime of any nature, is suspected.

That undercover work lies is intrinsically in a precarious place with regard to ethics, more than a few safeguards typically accompany its practice. Most essential to law enforcement is that the information so riskily obtained, and by so controversial a means, be valid as evidence. Federal law directly provides for police who must misrepresent themselves in order to avert or end conflict or crime. Even so, illegally obtained evidence is a monumental loss to both law force and public welfare, and undercover operatives must maneuver a tricky landscape: they are practicing calculated deception to achieve an end, yet within that deception they must adhere to stringent codes of conduct.

This imposes upon undercover officers a nearly insurmountable task, that of frequently needing to make sudden decisions affecting the procedure of the case which, while expediting the goal, may be ethically unsound. In effect, it is asking the police to navigate with a moral compass in a terrain where no actual compass points exist. “The desire to do the right thing in the undercover assignment often can result in the unintentional displacement of the moral compass in the…name of serving the greater good…” (Hummer, 2008, p.253).           

The Larger Picture

Polled Americans consistently reflect satisfaction with the need for undercover work. Recent terrorist activities at home and abroad have only served to reinforce a general public disinterest in issues of ethics in this regard, as narcotic and extreme criminal enterprises have usually been seen as fair game for the undercover teams. Yet there is a corollary to this sanction; we are inclined to believe in an ethical ‘rightness’ of undercover work when it is successful. Failures to secure arrests and/or prosecutions suddenly throw the undercover operation under scrutiny as a dubious moral choice.