Sean Seaver

Book states that Use of police personnel as undercover agents is an ethical approach to the problem of securing information...this is an opinion, and it's presented as fact. The author should specify that it's dangerous and disrespectful to develop relationships based on falsehood and that uniforms=ethical. Undercover agents should practice discretion and limit their time spent with criminals, because if they're going to pretend to be the ups man or water delivery guy and plant a listening device is less UNethical than befriending those who trust them knowingly planning on hurting them. All things secret lead to destruction and it's way more likely that you don't need a bunch of information about crime and who is doing it. Your job is not to make busts for the higher up muckety mucks. Your job is to control, prevent, and solve crimes. Just walk in there in your uniform and start looking at stuff and taking notes and it's done. They'll implode immediately, or all the parties with criminal activity to hide will jump in and it's time to offer support, not surveillance. Y'all gotta come running with the uniformed personnel, but real personnel won't be afraid. Acting like a crook will turn you into a crook, and trying to figure out what the best crime to set someone up with is not police work. Ethical and undercover barely intersect in my ven diagram. But the book says it's ethical. Nobody has a fact. Just opinions. This book kind of exploits the naiveté of an idealistic young person who believes they are hearing fact from an expert, when really they are being treated as a child who does not yet know what values they have, so they blindly accept the ones they're given. But that makes a good candidate. If the whole group adheres to the same code of ethics it's a stronger, albeit blind folded entity. But no, it's not ethical in the opinion of the majority of citizens. Americans deserve police that protect them, not entice them, and uniformed personnel, visible their entire shift, are going to stamp out crime and prevent it. Police making criminals of themselves to entice bad guys to act even worse cements, in triplicate, an already very seedy and dangerous thing. The criminal underworld should be considered a sewer. You want to smell like perfume and axe body spray, so don't swim in there. There are ninja turtles down there and Shredder is getting away. Can't even tell you how many times God called me to protect the world from one of my own people and not let them do anything bad...if I were an undercover agent it would be my goal to instigate something bad and encourage my bad friends and then document the suffering caused when they heed my goading. Readers of this book: good police aren't tricky people, they're not going to win a war of being slick. They are strong, smart, cooperative, and would be much better in uniform than undercover