The Man Who Was Thursday Essay

Undercover officers: are they positively or negatively impacted by their work?

In the novel The Man Who Was Thursday written by G. K. Chesteron, undercover policing is introduced in a very interesting way. Men are asked to join a secret police force to fight anarchy, as the book progresses the men of the secret police force are revealed to all be a part of the head group of anarchists. These men who had all been living in disguise as anarchists had been fooled into hiding from one another. Their lives were full of unrest as they worried about being discovered. While this was a fictitious story, there are men and women out there every day risking their lives and possibly their future mental health as they live as undercover officers. This paper

will explore the question: are undercover officers subject to mental disturbances causing negative impacts on their job and personal life? Evidence suggests that the answer is yes.
To evaluate evidence, the questions that must first be answered are: who and what are undercover officers?

How is the term mental disturbances to be defined? And what would be considered to be negative impacts on jobs and personal lives? Undercover officers are officers who operate in a “covert and deceptive” way, “an ‘undercover agent’ in the context of police work is a ‘police officer who gathers evidence of criminal activity without disclosing his or her identity to the suspect’” (Wamsley). Mental disturbances will be defined as anything resulting in a change to an officer’s personality or ability to think and act like they did prior to deployment. Negative impacts on jobs and personal lives will be defined as anything disrupting what life was like prior to becoming an undercover officer. With these terms defined, analyzing the lives of undercover agents during and after their deployment will reveal whether officers are positively or negatively

impacted.
Negative impacts of undercover policing are vast in number. They range from mild to severe and as A. D. Macleod states, “[the job is] physically, intellectually and emotionally demanding” (239). Undercover police officers must on a daily basis try to keep their real identity concealed, and for some this may go on for years at a time. The longer they are in deep undercover work, the more it has to take a toll on how they function once their job is complete. When officers return to normal work as street officers or back to their families they have to become themselves again, but who are they really? Officers may go through times of “. . . confusion and memory distortion, illustrated by the difficulty a secret agent for the Israeli Mossad had remembering his real name and place of origin” (McKenzie 241). Stephanie McKenzie also points out studies showing officers may unintentionally revert back to their undercover identity even while not currently being deployed (241). Yes, officers are subject to mental disturbances that negatively impact their job and personal life.
Undercover officers themselves speak of the struggle they have after being deployed: “Knowing what I know now, I don’t think I could ever work narcotics [undercover] again . . . I know I’ve changed. Certainly more cynical about what we’re doing . . . And for what? To dirty ourselves like the crooks?” (qtd. in Poole, and Pogrebin 389). Poole and Pogrebin found undercover officers have a hard time integrating back into normal routine with family and friends (389). This happens from the strange schedule that officers keep, the “late night temptations and partying that the role may bring, and personality and life style changes that the agent may undergo” (qtd. in Poole, and Pogrebin 389). It is difficult for officers to switch into their own identity after being in a criminal identity for so long and to develop normal social behavior again. One officer reports
[my wife and I] would go to a social gathering and I would end up off in some corner staring into the back yard and probably drinking too much, because I didn’t like the pressure. People would come up and ask me what I did for a living and I had some cockamamie story I would give . . .; it was always some lie. (qtd. in Poole and Pogrebin 391)
Poole, and Pogrebin in their article “Vice Isn’t Nice: A Look at the Effects of Working Undercover” report of another study done by a man named Farkas. They note his study showing “41 percent [of officers] reported adverse changes in interpersonal relations with family and friends, 37 percent experienced stress in associating with family and friends in public, and 33 percent expressed anxiety over not being able to discuss their assignments with family and friends” (391). Being an undercover officer puts great stress and pressure on officers and their family relationships creating considerable mental unrest as they return from deployment.
Not only are family and social relationships challenged by the mental stress of an undercover officer, but the work that the officer returns to is also impacted.

Again, Poole and Pegrebin use a study by Farkas to report “former undercover agents frequently suffer from such emotional problems as anxiety, loneliness, and suspiciousness . . .” (391). They also state “officers in this situation often report feeling lethargic and depressed as well as experiencing self-estrangement in their new assignments” (391). One police officer recounted “I was bored and restless and resented what I was doing. I just didn’t feel good about myself and was mad at everybody. I didn’t feel anybody understood what I was going through because they hadn’t done the things I had” (qtd. in Poole and Pegrebin 391). Much of what officers go through when they come back may well be associated with the change in the way they now perform their work. When returning to non-undercover work, they have to be more accountable to superiors, they have less flexibility, and the work may just seem less exciting (Poole, and Pegrebin 391). Undercover officers are subject to mental disturbances that negatively impact their job as they return from deployment.

Undercover officers can also be negatively impacted while still on their undercover deployment. These officers become very connected to the criminals that they are interacting with on a daily basis, they become their friends, they get to know the families of the criminals

and some officers even begin to believe the lies they themselves have been telling. Elizabeth E. Joh mentions that
Undercover officers can feel torn between actual camaraderie that develops between them and their targets, and the larger purpose for which they have been assigned. Similarly, undercover agents can develop romantic relationships with targets that muddy their priorities. Along with these changed loyalties there may emerge altered attitudes and beliefs, including changed beliefs about the propriety of law itself (“Breaking the law to enforce it: undercover police participation in crime,” sec. III. C. 1. a.).
Officers who have been undercover may find themselves breaking laws as one of the criminals they have been spending time with. Elizabeth E. Joh confirms this by mentioning that “there is camaraderie in a band of thieves; participating in the same crimes as those being investigated increases the risk of over-identification with targets” (“Breaking the law to enforce it: undercover police participation in crime,” sec. III. C. 1. b.). Undercover officers are mentally impacted by their roles changing the way they interact with society.

Some undercover officers can see benefits from the work that they do. A. D. Macleod notes that “almost 60% of agents subjectively reported positive personal gains from their experience: a sense of satisfaction, enhanced confidence, and personal growth” (242). Despite undercover work being physically and emotionally demanding, with the right precautions in place, the long lasting negative impacts on an undercover officer can be limited. Nicholas Wamsley reports in his article “Big Brother Gone Awry: Undercover Policing Facing a Legitimacy Crisis” that
through proper selection and training of undercover officers, as well as rules governing how and when to conduct undercover operations, police departments can ensure that undercover recruits have both the innate characteristics to withstand intense mental strain and the training necessary to prevent many negative psychological consequences.
Yes, police departments can work to help lessen the demands of undercover work and they do have many policies and procedures in place to work with officers who will be and/or have been deployed. Police departments however cannot prepare officers for everything they will face nor can they eliminate the stresses. They can give the officers tools to help deal with the stress, but officers have to choose to use those tools. Tools that are provided are only that, tools, they are not the answer to the emotional stress and strain that occurs. Even when officers seek to be completely prepared, and seek help for their stresses, it can’t be denied that undercover officers will still experience mental disturbances that will impact their life in some way.
Evidence points to the undeniable idea that undercover officers are subject to mental disturbances causing negative impacts on their jobs and personal lives. They have trouble switching identities from their undercover identity to their actual identity, they experience anxiety, depression and sometimes confusion. Officers that have been undercover even experience difficulties returning to regular police work as well as being negatively impacted while on undercover assignment. There are some emotional benefits to officers who have been deployed in undercover work, and ways to help lessen the strain, but overall there are more instances of negative impact on officers than positive and reversible impact. Undercover officers are under a great deal of stress as they perform their duties, these stresses lead to many mental disturbances that negatively impact the officers in their jobs and personal lives.