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

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

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