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research-article2016
QRJ0010.1177/1468794115622529Qualitative ResearchMac Giollabhuí et al.

Article Q
Watching the watchers: R
conducting ethnographic Qualitative Research

research on covert police 1­–16

© The Author(s) 2016

investigation in the United

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DOI: 10.1177/1468794115622529
Kingdom qrj.sagepub.com

Shane Mac Giollabhuí

Trinity College, University of Dublin, Republic of Ireland

Benjamin Goold
University of British Columbia, Canada

Bethan Loftus
University of Manchester, UK

Abstract
It has long been claimed that the police are the most visible symbol of the criminal justice system
(Bittner, 1974). There is, however, a significant strand of policing – covert investigation that
relies routinely on methods of deception – that resists public revelation (Ross, 2008). The
growing importance of covert police investigation has profound implications for the relationship
between citizen and the state in a democratic society, but it is relatively unexplored by police
researchers. In this article, we describe the methodology of the first ethnographic study of how
the introduction of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) – a piece of ‘enabling’
legislation that regulates the conditions under which law enforcement agencies can intervene in
the privacy of individuals – has effected the conduct of covert police investigation in the United
Kingdom. We describe our ethnographic experience in the ‘secret world’ of covert policing,
which is familiar in many respects to ethnographers of uniformed officers, but which also differed
significantly. We contend that the organizing principle of surveillance – the imperative to maintain
the secrecy of an operation – had a marked impact on our ethnographic experience, which
eroded significantly our status as non-participant observers and altered out reflexive experience
by activating the ‘usefulness’ of our gender.

Keywords
covert police investigation, ethnography, policing, RIPA, surveillance

Corresponding author:
Shane Mac Giollabhuí, Trinity College, University of Dublin, Dublin, Republic of Ireland.
Email: smacgiol@tcd.ie

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2 Qualitative Research 

Introduction
In recent decades, the nature of criminal investigation has undergone a number of impor-
tant changes: investigations are increasingly anticipatory (investigators are no longer
predominately reactive and incident-driven); actuarial (subjects are targeted according
to a statistical estimation of the risk they pose); bureaucratic (resources are allocated
according to a set of rules and formal procedures); and intrusive (investigators use
sophisticated technology to access a vast array of personal information). These changes
have been described by using a variety of labels – ‘proactive’, ‘intelligence-led’, ‘prob-
lem-solving’ – to depict the changing approach towards crime control (Reiner and
Newburn, 1992: 361; Roberts, 2007: 99). While these changes are significant – and have
drawn considerable interest from criminologists – there have been other shifts in the
practice of policing that have garnered surprisingly less attention. Criminal investigation
is now not only more proactive and problem-driven, it is also increasingly covert and
deceptive (Loftus et al., 2016; Sharpe, 2002).1
The growing importance of covert police investigation has not, however, been matched
by sustained interest from empirical researchers. While there is a relatively healthy body
of literature on some of the theoretical and legal aspects of covert investigations (see, for
instance, Wagner, 2007; Joh, 2009; Ross, 2007; Roberts, 2000), empirical coverage of
covert investigation has been highly uneven. The pioneering work of Marx (1988) remains
an important point of departure for any scholar of covert policing, but it has a narrow
empirical and temporal focus and is based largely on documentary and media analysis.
There is also a marked normative bias to the literature, which has focused heavily on the
ethical dimensions of covert surveillance, questioning in particular whether surveillance
in democratic societies is a ‘necessary evil’ (Marx, 1988: 77; see also Ross, 2008; Fijnaut
and Marks, 1995; Wachtel, 1992). Our understanding of covert investigation, then, rests
on an uneasy foundation of untested assumptions (Kruisbergen et al., 2011).
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that we know so little about the world of covert policing
(compared to our knowledge of ‘mainstream’, overt policing), but the imbalance is none-
theless striking. The organizing principle of covert investigation – the need for secrecy
and invisibility – inverts the logic of uniformed police work, which is defined by its vis-
ibility as a deliberate and highly public spectacle that routinely involves a striking visu-
ally display of power (Manning, 2003). This inversion places covert investigators in both
a privileged and potentially dangerous position vis a vis the public. Covert policing tends
to be more fluid and unpredictable than routine patrol and investigative work, which
heightens the likelihood of error; its inherently secretive nature lessens the probability
that errors will be exposed and offending officers held accountable (Marx, 1988). It is
difficult to hold to account a set of employees who do not have a recognisable uniform,
collar number, visible supervisor, or a fixed location for work. In sum, the dilemmas
faced by police officers are compounded in the covert context.
These fundamental differences raise, in turn, a set of serious concerns about how the
state, in a democratic society, can establish a regulatory system that reconciles civil liber-
ties and police accountability, on one hand, with the requirement to prevent and detect
crime, on the other (Bhatt, 2006; Ross, 2007). Ewing and Geary (1997: 7) summarize
this concern neatly:

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Mac Giollabhuí et al. 3

[S]tate powers of surveillance are exercised against the innocent as well as the guilty and are
inevitably employed in great secrecy and without the knowledge of the target. They also
constitute the most serious violation, not only of property rights recognized by the common
law, but also of fundamental freedoms recognized by the European Convention on Human
Rights. Even if judged to be necessary, such powers should be subjected to the most searching
safeguards, limiting their exercise and protecting the citizen from their over-enthusiastic use.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) – an ‘enabling’ piece of legisla-
tion prompted by the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 (Bhatt, 2006) – was
intended to address these concerns (Bullock and Johnson, 2011). Most crucially, the Act
altered fundamentally the basis of police authority for covert investigation, turning on its
head the ‘common law principle that whatever is not expressly forbidden by law is permis-
sible’ (Cheney et al., 2001: 87). RIPA ‘seek[s] to provide legality within a framework of
accountability’, while requiring investigators to demonstrate that any interference with
human rights is justifiable, pursuant to some legitimate aim, and necessary in a democratic
society’ (Clark, 2007: 429). It is, however, an open question as to whether RIPA performs
this function adequately. Critics insist that its passage is another – and particularly egre-
gious – example of the UK ‘sleepwalking’ into a surveillance society (Lyon, 2007).
We carried out an extensive empirical investigation into how existing legislation
aimed at governing police surveillance – most notably the Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 – has affected the surveillance activities of police forces in the
UK. The research, uniquely, also aims to produce the first comprehensive field account
of covert policing. In this article, we seek to provide a detailed and reflexive discussion
of the methodology employed in the first ethnographic study of covert police investiga-
tion in the United Kingdom. The article is divided into three sections. Firstly, we intro-
duce how we applied the ethnographic method to our case. We contend that an
ethnography is tailor-made for the study of covert policing because participant observa-
tion – conducted intensively over a prolonged duration of time – allows researchers to
‘circumvent the minefield of defenses that protect the concealed reality of police work’
(Punch, 1989: 178). Second, we discuss how we approached a challenge that is familiar
to ethnographers of uniformed policing: the need to overcome suspicion of the outsider.
Third, we reflect on how our ethnography of covert police investigators differed to cor-
responding studies of uniformed police officers. We discovered that the defining feature
of covert policing, the imperative to maintain the ‘cover’ of surveillance officers, influ-
enced heavily our ethnographic experience in a way which seems qualitatively different
to ethnographies of overt policing. We had no option other than to participate actively in
the maintenance of the ‘invisibility’ of the surveillance team, which eroded our status as
non-participant observers and activated our gender as a useful component of our cover
within the surveillance teams.

An ethnography of covert police investigation in the United

Kingdom
The police, according to Holdaway (1983: 5) is ‘an extremely powerful organization
which begs revelation of its public and private face by first-hand observation – risky

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4 Qualitative Research 

as that observation may be.’ If this edict applies to uniformed officers, it is especially
relevant to the secretive and concealed world of covert police investigation. Very little
is known about the culture and organization of covert policing, which suggested that
an ethnographic approach would be the most appropriate and effective means to pen-
etrate the interior landscape of covert policing.2 At its core, ethnography involves pro-
longed and intensive observation of research participants in their ‘natural habitat’; it
requires researchers to take part ‘in the daily activities, rituals, interactions, and events
of a group of people’ (DeWalt and DeWalt, 2002: 1). Ethnographic approaches are
particularly appropriate for studying the working assumptions and low visibility prac-
tices of officers because such assumptions and practices invariably operate beneath the
presentational canopy of police organizations (Chan, 1996). By immersing themselves
in their host society, the job of the police researcher is to pierce this structure and cap-
ture the informal face of the organization. This inevitably involves developing rapport
with officers over a period of time in order to witness their ‘backstage’ performances
(Goffman, 1969). Given certain key features of covert police working life – including
the tendency towards secrecy and institutional isolationism – it can be argued that an
ethnographic approach is not only appropriate for the study of overt policing, it is
necessary.
It is, however, notoriously difficult for researchers to gain access to police organiza-
tions at the best of times (Fox and Lundman, 1974; Holdaway, 1983). External research-
ers, in particular, face a particularly steep hurdle – especially if their interests lie in the
controversial and deceptive methods used by specialist investigators. We conducted our
research between 2009 and 2011 in what we will refer to as ‘Summershire Police
Service’.3 As with all police research, the terms of our access to Summershire deter-
mined the parameters of our research. We did not receive unfettered access to observe
every single covert unit operating within the force: Prison Intelligence and the
Confidential Unit were off-limits, although we were granted permission to interview this
latter group of officers. There was also a strict bar on access to intercepted communica-
tions (telephone calls, emails, etc.), although this was because Schedule I of RIPA (2000)
places a legal restriction on who can access the product of a warranted interception of
communications. Access to the Counter-Terrorism and the Professional Standards
Department (where officers were themselves under investigation) was also prohibited.
We provided a guarantee that all of our notes would be anonymised to protect the identity
of officers and members of the public.
The project addressed several research questions, focusing on how the regulatory
environment – which is laid out in a suite of legislation, most notably the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act (2000) and the Police Act (1997) – influences covert police
investigation. Firstly, how do officers plan, resource and conduct covert investigations?
Second, how have police officers interpreted the procedures and requirements set out
under the legislation. Third, does the regulatory regime strike an appropriate balance
between the need for police accountability and protection of civil liberties, on the one
hand, and operational efficiency and the demands of security, on the other? There were a
range of other methodological issues that arose in the study, particularly the ethical
implications of such a project, which we address elsewhere (Loftus et al., 2016). In order
to address the questions that deal primarily with how the regulatory environment

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Mac Giollabhuí et al. 5

influence the conduct of covert police investigation, we directed our time towards the
five stages of a covert operation.

Step 1: Intelligence: officers develop a profile of a criminal suspect, or ‘target’; if the

case is compelling (targets are prioritized according to the risk they pose), the case is
allocated to an investigative team at a ‘tactical tasking and coordination meeting’.
Step 2: Investigation: once the investigative unit receives a case, the team designate
an ‘applicant’ officer who writes a formal application to seek authorization to intrude
in the privacy of a criminal suspect (RIPA, 2000), and/or interfere with their property
(as set out in the Police Act 1997).
Step 3: Central Authorities Bureau: a team of officers, RIPA ‘experts’, vet the applica-
tion to ensure the application conforms with legislative requirements and police ‘best
practice’.
Step 4: Authorization: the legislation divides this function among three different
groups: ‘directed surveillance’ and the deployment of ‘covert human intelligence
sources’ are authorized by a police Superintendent; ‘intrusive surveillance’ is author-
ized by the Office of Surveillance Commissioners; and interference with property is
authorized by the police Chief Constable.
Step 5: Operations: once the application is authorized, the investigation proceeds
apace with involvement by a range of operational police units. The precise role played
by each unit varies considerably according to the nature of the investigation.

The project methodology was primarily ethnographic, but we also conducted semi-
structured interviews with officers at all stages of the life-cycle of a covert investigation.
We divided our time relatively evenly at each stage of an investigation, which were con-
ducted at either the local-level by officers investigating what could be described as street
crime (burglary, assault, and so on), or at the divisional level by officers conducting
prolonged and intrusive investigations into serious and organized crime. The research
sites at the first three stages of an investigation are divided relatively strictly between
area and division. At stage one, we observed the Divisional Intelligence Unit (DIU) and
their counterparts at the Area level (AIUs), in addition to local investigators (who write
RIPA applications) and the officers of the Ground Intelligence Office (GIO) whose role
is, inter alia, to write applications for more complex divisional investigations. At the
third and fourth stages in the investigative life-cycle, we observed officers in the Central
Authorities Bureau (CAB) and interviewed police Superintendents, who authorize the
majority of applications made under RIPA. One of the fieldworkers attended a five-day
residential training course for authorizing officers, which was provided by the National
Police Improvement Agency. We also interviewed the Chief Surveillance Commissioner,
Sir Christopher Rose, and one of the senior members of his team, who oversees the day-
to-day functioning of the OSC. Finally, we carried out interviews with police managers
and field officers from Summershire Police, as well as representatives from the Office of
Surveillance Commissioners, Ministry of Justice, the National Policing Improvement
Agency, and Liberty.

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6 Qualitative Research 

Penetrating fronts: inside the secret world of covert

policing
Secrecy is an organizing principle that sets the occupation of covert investigation – and,
we suspect, the occupational culture of covert investigators – apart from their uniformed
counterparts. Secrecy, indeed, is embedded in every stage in the life-cycle of a covert
investigation (Marx, 1980, 1988; Ross, 2008: 239–40). When investigators first identify
a person of interest (a ‘target’), surveillance and property interference is either author-
ized by a senior police officer or, in the case of interception of communications and
intrusive surveillance, authorized ex parte by the Home Secretary or the Office of
Surveillance Commissioners. Over the course of the operation, covert investigators go to
great lengths to conceal their presence and tradecraft from both criminal subject(s) and
the general public. In the event of an arrest, investigators can continue to protect their
sources and covert methods by seeking a court order – known as ‘public interest immu-
nity’ – to allow the prosecution to refrain from disclosing details about the investigation
to the defense. Finally, if a citizen challenges the lawful basis of surveillance, the legal
proceedings at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal are held in private. Secrecy, in short,
defines the occupation of covert investigation.
The question, then, becomes: how might an ethnography of such an ‘extreme’ envi-
ronment differ to equivalent studies of mainstream (overt) sections of a police force.
There is an established ethnographic literature that describes ‘cop culture’; one of its
central characteristics is, of course, officers’ suspicion of outsiders (Cain, 1973;
Holdaway, 1983; Loftus, 2012; Manning, 1977, 1989; Reiner, 1992). This cultural reflex
to conceal their behavior from outsiders can be traced to officers’ general sense of isola-
tion from the public (Skolnick, 1966; Reiner, 1992), but also has its roots in the distrust
shown by ordinary officers towards their desk-bound superiors, who tend to use strict
disciplinary measures to punish any lapses in ‘professional’ conduct (Brown, 1988). In
short, the police organization is a forbidding site to research. In our ethnographic
research, we expected officers working to display a significantly heightened level of
suspicion and distrust – not simply because they are unaccustomed to external observa-
tion, but also because of the organizing principle of its tradecraft, which privileges the
‘hoarding’ of information (Ross, 2008).
Intelligence is the stock-in-trade of covert investigators, who are trained – and
required by law in the case of intercepted communications – to restrict access to this
information. A failure to maintain the security of this information is important for a
number of reasons: loose control of intelligence can compromise the secrecy of a live
operation, endanger the safety of cooperating members of the public (such as individu-
als who, for instance, agree to allow officers to set up an ‘observation post’ in their
property), put the lives of informants and undercover officers at risk, and increase the
likelihood of police corruption. It was no surprise, then, that we entered an environ-
ment that encouraged an ‘incessant paranoia’ (in the words of one police officer) about
what and with whom information could be shared. As the following excerpt from field-
notes demonstrates, officers access information on a strictly ‘need-to-know’ basis,
meaning that investigators work inside units that are divided rigidly into mutually
exclusive sections:

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Mac Giollabhuí et al. 7

I arrive early at the headquarters of the Organised Crime Unit (OCU). The place is a hive of
activity, and I bump into an Inspector who is handling one of the cases that is coming through
tasking next week. There are four people in the room: a financial investigator, two detective
constables (DCs) and the sergeant. I overhear Detective Sergeant (DS) Bracknell, who was on
the phone. DS: That was [Sergeant of TSU]. We need to have a chat’. DC: ‘Shall we pop next
door.’ I’m worried that they feel they have to leave the room to talk about anything and
everything. Two hours later, the same thing happens. When they leave, I turn to the Inspector. I
ask, ‘are they avoiding me?’ No, mate, they’re avoiding us all – they’re working on a job we’re
not authorised to know about.’

This treatment of information sets covert police investigation apart from its mainstream
counterpart. In the next section of this article, we explore how the two primary field-
workers in our project (Loftus and Mac Giollabhuí) accessed and navigated this secretive
environment. In some ways, we encountered a set of challenges familiar to other police
ethnographers – tests of allegiance, and the charge that we were working as management
spies – but we also encountered some marked dissimilarities between our experience and
the experience of other ethnographers of uniformed police officers.

The suspecting glance: becoming a trusted outsider in the world of covert

policing
We conducted a classic ‘outsider-outsider’ study, which meant negotiating with senior
officers inside Summershire to gain access to this secretive world of covert policing. The
process took over a year but was softened by an existing research relationship between a
member of our research team and the Chief Constable. Our access was possibly facili-
tated by the fact that the police had a motive to grant entry: there is a long-standing griev-
ance among officers with an interest in RIPA that the legislation has imposed a heavy
‘bureaucratic burden’.4 This control continued beyond our initial entry to the middle-
management, who were in charge of each unit in the organizational ‘chain’ of covert
investigations. Like other police ethnographers, we found we had to renegotiate access
continuously – providing consistent and unequivocal guarantees about the protection of
sensitive information (Marks, 2004).
Officers developed two basic hypotheses (one fanciful, one plausible) to account
for our participation in covert surveillance operations. Firstly, officers involved in
conducting mobile surveillance speculated that we might be officers from the
Professional Standards Department, deployed to infiltrate their unit and look for
evidence of malpractice.5 This suspicion seemed to exert a tenacious grip on the
imagination of some of the officers, particularly the younger members of one sur-
veillance team. We believe the officers rejected the ‘mole’ hypothesis relatively
quickly, but some officers were surprisingly receptive to it as the following excerpt
demonstrates:

10am, Summershire Police HQ. The members of the Mobile Surveillance Team (MST) stroll
straight past reception and, as I pass the desk, the receptionist [who normally signs me in],
glares at me but lets me pass without challenge. I get in the lift with Jake and two short, stocky,
balding officers in plain clothes (that I have already met), who had been waiting at the doors.

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8 Qualitative Research 

‘Have you met [author reference] yet, boys?’ Jake enquires. ‘He’s from the “island” [informal
slang for the Professional Standards Department]. He’ll be spending a few days with us.’ There
is a stunned silence in the lift. Jake hops up and down in pleasure at the success of his joke.

However, officers discarded the hypothesis once we had become established in the
team. The more plausible – and, we suspect, more damaging – hypothesis positioned
us as management spies. The premise of this suspicion was absolutely understandable;
officers were perplexed about the privileged access given to external researchers –
‘civilians’ – to one of the most secretive units within the Force. This perception, we
think, was partly a function of timing: the fieldwork was conducted during a period of
severe cuts to police budgets, which led some officers to conclude that we were some-
how acting as ‘troubleshooters’, engaged to identify cost-cutting measures in an age of
austerity. This heightened level of suspicion made officers acutely aware of our pres-
ence, which may have influenced the reliability of our observations (Punch, 1979).
This effect, by definition, is impossible to identify (and quantify) in a single-shot
study, but every so often the existence of such a bias – if not its observable implications
– became quite apparent, as the following excerpt from fieldnotes shows:

8am, briefing with the Mobile Surveillance Team at an undisclosed police facility: The
operation is to follow a subject believed to be a key player in the local drugs market. The
subject is part of a crime ‘family’ – with red flags on the system for firearms and surveillance
awareness – that has amassed an apparent fortune over the years. When the briefing ends, we
file down the stairs towards the car park. I am paired with Frank. As we find the maps, check
communications in the car, Jonathan jogs over to us. ‘It’s off mate! Can you fucking believe
it? Dickheads let him sign out earlier.’ Frank snorts at the apparent stupidity of the investigative
officers. We get out of the car and head towards the side entrance where the rest of the team
is gathering. ‘This is terrible’ Philip sighs, ‘finished by noon on a Friday, and with the tour
[de France] on too.’ There are a couple of smiles, and Terence [the operational commander]
looks sheepish. For the first time with Terence, I find he is picking his words very carefully
in my presence. As we leave the car park, he walks with me and carefully explains where the
mistake occurred (outside the MST) and how easily preventable it all was. ‘Just one fucking
phone call mate.’ As he is walking back to his car, he turns and smiles in my direction: ‘Put
that in your report.’

This level of suspicion was present throughout our time in the field (and was particularly
noticeable in the early days), but it is not an uncommon experience (Hunt, 1984; Reiner,
1978). Ironically, we were sometimes hindered by the fact that that the research had been
sanctioned by the Chief Constable – one of the officers liked to make the occasional
disparaging joke that we were ‘friends of the Chief’ – but, in either case, we felt that we
had little choice other than to follow the standard prescription of all ethnographers to
‘settle down and forget about being a sociologist’ (Goffman, 1989: 129).
Our attempts to build trust resembled the experience of many police ethnographers.
During our time with the Mobile Surveillance Team, for instance, we ‘earned our keep’.
The question of how far one participates is particularly problematic in police research,
and has been widely debated (Marks, 2004; Punch, 1979). We found, however, that we
sometimes had little choice other than to participate actively in the operational duties of

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Mac Giollabhuí et al. 9

the team in order to increase the trust of officers. This next extract recounts a typical
incident in which the fine line from observer to participant observer became crossed
(Gold, 1958):

9.05am: In the car park, Diana is nervous and talks quietly to John [an experienced officer] to
get a fuller picture of the operation. He carefully and humorously reconstructs the objectives
and intelligence picture ‘when we find them, bish bash bosh’ [slang for ‘making an arrest,
possibly using physical force; a firearms team is accompanying the surveillance team on this
operation]. We return to the car and I can hear the tension in Diana’s voice as she asks me to
activate the code-protected radio and to ‘do the maps’ [help with navigation and coordination
of our vehicle in the wider team]. It is phrased as an order.

We also shared the danger of this type of police work, which sometimes brought with it
tests of allegiance. One of the most common dangers faced by surveillance teams is a
serious collision with another vehicle. The potential for this hazard is constant: surveil-
lance routinely involves driving at high speed and often involves dangerous manoeuver-
ing. The following excerpt describes an occasion when we shared the risk:

The worst has happened: the team has lost the subject vehicle. The cars fan out to try to recover
it. We drive down a narrow road on a built-up residential estate at 60mph, making for a stretch
of open road that the suspect might have taken. In the gap between two rows of parked cars, we
come within a hairs breadth of hitting another motorist. I see the look of fear and disbelief on
her face as our vehicle charges the gap. As we pass through the eye of the needle, David lets out
a roar: ‘Fuck mate! I thought I was going to have to ask you to lie there!’ Tyres squeal as we
take a right at the junction; we break a red light and accelerate sharply as the road opens. Round
a corner, a lorry comes into view and David is right up behind it. ‘Come on, come on’, he
mutters, ‘give me a view….’

This incident also suggests we were making some headway in our effort to secure the
trust of our research participants. David treated me like any other officer, trusting that I
would conceal an instance of minor deviance from the attention of supervisors (Cain,
1973; Punch, 1989). These moments of complicity with our research participants were
not uncommon, especially as time wore on. We were, for instance, in the field during the
summer of 2010 when the World Cup was held in South Africa. There were more than a
few football fanatics on the MST, some of whom had come up with inventive ways to
reconcile shift-work with watching the match:

19.57: We are having huge trouble getting a signal on Tony’s own portable TV to watch the first
World Cup semi-final. We swing into a deserted commercial car park. We can see we’re in a
hollow spot and speculate about how to get a decent picture. We leave our position and ascend
a nearby hill. At the top, the signal improves marginally – at least enough to guess the sport, but
nowhere near good enough to let us enjoy viewing the game. The Dutch team have gone a goal
up. We return to the (deserted) commercial car park, Tony muttering ‘fucking disaster’ to
no-one in particular. 20.10: Vigilance is at an all-time low. We circle the car park at a snail’s
pace trying to find the best signal. I’ve got my arm out the window, trying to secure the antennae
to the roof. Eventually, we give up and turn on the radio. As I smoke a cigarette outside the car,
I hear the radio blaring ‘NO CHANGE NO CHANGE.’ The volume is much too high and in his

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10 Qualitative Research 

eagerness to turn it down, Tony inadvertently hoots the horn. He roars laughing, and lets loose
a barely muffled bark: ‘Anybody? Covert surveillance going on here’! A few minutes later,
Nigel telephones. I hear the first sentence: ‘so what do you think matie boy’s up to then?’ Tony
says: ‘Who?’. Nigel replies, ‘You know, the subject?’ It hasn’t crossed either of our minds:
‘matie boy’ is on bail, probably a football fan, didn’t do anything the previous night, and has a
tracker fitted to his car [which shows the vehicle still parked on his driveway].

These vignettes from our fieldnotes describe a number of experiences that are similar to
the experiences of many other police ethnographers. We followed the standard formula
to gain access to ‘the hidden dimensions of the subject’s world’ (Hunt, 1984: 283), which
instructs the ethnographer to act spontaneously and naturally (Spano, 2007; Skolnick,
1966). We tried, in short, to become ‘part of the furniture’ (Martin, 1980: 225). This
research process resembles the experience of many other ethnographers, who also par-
ticipated in both the exciting and mundane aspects of the work, helping to share the
burden of exhausting shift-work, and hoping to gain in time the trust of research partici-
pants (Emerson, 1983; Johnson, 1975; Van Maanen, 1988).

Maintaining cover: Participation and gender in the world of

cover policing
We also discovered, however, that a defining characteristic of the work undertaken by the
Mobile Surveillance Teams exerted a significant effect on our ethnographic experience,
which we believe is in many respects quite novel. There is, as we mentioned earlier, an obvi-
ous difference between overt and covert policing: unlike their counterparts outside the cov-
ert world, surveillance officers do not need to retain the authority of the constable, which is
a staple of the police officer’s working personality (Bittner, 1974). Surveillance officers,
instead, must keep their identity as police officers hidden from public view. This aspect of
covert police investigation – the overriding priority to retain cover and remain invisible –
places the surveillance officer in a qualitatively different relationship with the public. It also
placed the two fieldworkers in a different position to our research participants. We, no less
than the officers, had to participate actively in the maintenance of the surveillance team’s
cover. The following excerpt demonstrates the (everyday) risk of ‘getting burned’:

The subject vehicle is homeward-bound, our convoy winding its way in pursuit. As Nelson and I
approach the outskirts of town, we follow the van into an estate, before handing it over at a
junction to the back-up vehicle. Malcolm speeds up a short grassy hillock to gain a view of the
subject vehicle, which has disappeared. Meanwhile, Nelson and I pull up around by the back of
the housing estate. Just as we pull in to park, the subject vehicle appears ahead. The tension in the
vehicle ratchets higher and Nelson emits a plaintive expletive as the vehicle parks directly in front
of us, about 10 metres away. We are in plain view of the subject, if he decides to look up. I
continue eating my lunch as nonchalantly as I can manage, while Nelson sits quietly with his eyes
cast down. Neither of us move a muscle as the subject bounds away from the vehicle and walks
up a set of stairs. He is, thankfully, on the telephone and pays no attention to his surroundings.

The shared risk of exposure fostered a close bond of trust within surveillance teams,
but it also raised a question about the precise nature of the role we played during our

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Mac Giollabhuí et al. 11

time with the MST. How did the imperative to conform to the cardinal rule of covert
surveillance – the need to maintain cover – influence our ethnographic experience?
We found that in moments of crisis – when the team’s ‘invisibility’ relied on our
active cooperation – we had no real choice other than to participate in precisely the
same way as other police officers in the maintenance of that cover. Moments of crisis
were few and far between in the course of our fieldwork. Indeed, the prevailing mem-
ory of our time with covert units is the boredom of waiting around in surveillance cars
and vans on what officers term ‘dead plots’. However, on the occasions when the
cover of the team was threatened, we discovered that our status as non-participant
observers eroded entirely.
The following fieldnote demonstrates how in a moment of crisis one of the field-
workers (Mac Giollabhuí) had no choice other than to follow police procedure to pre-
serve the ‘invisibility’ of the surveillance unit. In this incident, the Mobile Surveillance
Team and a firearms unit had been deployed to observe the transfer of goods and money
between the target of our surveillance operation and a second group of criminals. The
intelligence about this transfer had been received from an informant from within the
group, who had also warned that members of the gang would, in all likelihood, be armed.
The following excerpt from fieldnotes begins at the point when the MST follows the
subject into a housing estate:

We’ve got a view of Subject 1. There’s a gap of about 50 metres between us, but we have no car
cover (there aren’t any vehicles between us and the subject, which is risky). I’m in the car with
Alicia and we watch as Subject 1 overtakes a slow-moving vehicle. As we approach the back
of this second vehicle, I see a small blonde-haired head peek out from the back seat. The child
stares directly at us. The head disappears and the red car makes a sharp right-hand turn. Subject
1 takes the next left into a small cul-de-sac. Alicia passes control of the subject to the back-up
vehicle in the team, who continues to provide commentary on Subject 1’s movement inside the
estate. We continue on ahead to take up a position controlling the northern exit of the estate and
I turn inquiringly to Alicia, who has also noticed the suspicious behavior of the red car. Have
we been burned? We pull into a side-road and come to a stop right at the entrance to a primary
school.

Over the radio, Lee – who has deployed in a bush [I recall him being covered in scratches at the
debriefing later on ] – is describing the movement of Subject 1. He has parked outside a house
and rang the doorbell. In a terse broadcast, Lee tells us ‘the person living here has compromised
surveillance before.’ Alicia is now tense and hyper-alert. We are parked about 100 metres from
the subject’s location with a view – through the tinted rear windows of our vehicle – of the
mouth of the road leading to the house. Lee describes movement: two men emerge from inside
the house and stand talking to Subject 1. Subject 2’s car pulls into the cul-de-sac, one of the men
suddenly breaks ranks, and starts walking towards the mouth of the road. I can see him now. He
is holding a telephone to his ear, the right elbow held high in the air. I count his steps, wondering
in a very abstract way what he is up to. He is small, stocky and as he moves his shoulders sway
with menacing purpose. I realise with a shudder that he is coming straight towards our position.

Alicia calmly describes the subject’s movement towards us over the radio. I feel weak at the
knees. Quietly, Alicia turns and says ‘we may need to cuddle here.’ I swivel slowly in her
direction, letting my arm loop around her head rest. The man is now less than 30 metres away

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12 Qualitative Research 

and I see through our tinted rear window that he’s making straight for us. I dip my head closer
to Alicia and she turns her body away from the driver’s door. Too much time passes, and when
I peek again from the corner of my eye, the subject has turned on his heels – satisfied, I wonder,
by the innocence of our innocuous canoodling? – and is walking back towards the house,
telephone still locked to his ear. A wave of relief washes over me. Alicia turns the radio back
up. (I hadn’t even noticed her turn the volume down). We listen to the commentary: the firearms
unit is swooping, making the arrests.

This incident raises a number of questions about our status as ‘observer’. First, what
would have happened had Mac Giollabhuí left the car? Had he left the vehicle, it would
have put the police officer in danger and, course, compromised effectively the surveil-
lance operation – but it would also have compromised effectively his position as an eth-
nographer. The choice at this critical juncture was precisely the same for both ethnographer
and police officer: stay in the car and put up a ‘front’, or walk away from the job (of
ethnography and surveillance). This alignment between the demands of both roles dem-
onstrates how the ethnographer’s status as a non-participating observer eroded.
The following vignette demonstrates a similar brush with exposure. The episode takes
place during a stint by by one of the field researchers (Loftus) with Alf (a member of a
Local Surveillance Unit), who had been tasked with picking up several of the ‘trap cars’
from various locations, replacing the batteries in the covert cameras and then reparking
them at different locations.6 As the extract shows, the ability of the female researcher to
portray a sense of normalcy was crucial in protecting the secrecy of the operation:

The plan was to drive this car to a different location in the countryside and swap it with another
car that had been parked for the last two weeks. We drove for over half an hour before arriving
at a typical English village. Just outside a large house, a Volkswagen Golf was parked on the
side of the road. Colin gave me the keys and told me to get into the passenger seat. He was
going to park the car we were currently in about half a mile away, and then walk back to me.
Despite a Satellite Navigation System being placed on display, the vehicle did not show any
signs of forced entry. Within five minutes, a man in his 50s wearing a suit came over to the car
and knocked loudly on my side of the window. I wound it down and he asked me sternly if this
was my car. Not wanting to give the game away, I had no option but to lie. I said that it was my
car and asked why he wanted to know. He asked why it had been parked outside his house for
the last two weeks, telling me that he had rang the police and reported it as stolen. I acted
surprised and replied that my husband and I had been away on holiday and had left the car here
because we had friends in the village. I added that my husband would be back in a moment if
he wanted to chat more about it, but that I could assure him the car was not stolen. He accepted
my story and then became friendly. When Colin returned to the car and drove off I told him
what had happened. He was impressed, saying I had done well to lie. […] This incident was
retold to several of the officers and afforded me some respect within the team.

Mac Giollabhuí and Loftus faced a similar choice in both encounters: follow police pro-
cedure, put up a front – or expose the surveillance operation and compromise our access
to the surveillance units. The point, in short, is that if we wished to observe at first-hand
the activities of the surveillance teams, we had little choice other than to participate fully
in the surveillance team’s ‘front’. This dilemma is, we think, a particularly novel experi-
ence for the police ethnographer.

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Mac Giollabhuí et al. 13

These episodes also highlight the importance of the demographic characteristics (in
this case, gender) of ethnographers studying covert policing. The salience of our gender
reflected the interesting gender dynamic at work inside surveillance teams. A female-male
pair of officer is an obvious asset, because the officers can pose easily as a couple. Female
officers are also highly valued inside surveillance teams for other reasons. ‘A good girl’,
according to one (male) officer, ‘is worth two men because [because] girls have the ability
to be a chameleon.’ Another (male) officer argued that ‘women are equally as good [as
men] and you could argue that they’re better: people are less suspicious of women.’ It is
important to note that in these statements, there was no normative commitment to the
spirit of ‘diversity’. Rather, women (and, by extension, ethnic minorities) were prized for
their usefulness – or, in other words, their ability to penetrate criminal environments and
thereby extend and enhance the capabilities of the surveillance operation.
These findings suggest that our experience as ethnographers differed significantly to
those of other ethnographers of uniformed police officers. Secrecy is the defining char-
acteristic of covert police investigation, which influenced our ethnographic experience.
The risk of exposure – and the corresponding imperative to retain cover and participate
actively in the daily grind of surveillance – facilitated our integration into our environ-
ment and eroded our status as non-participant observers. Second, it activated our identity
– specifically our gender – in a novel way. There is a trope in the ethnographic literature
that a female researcher working in a male dominated environment is problematic: at
best, a ‘useful incompetent’ (Lofland, 1971: 100) and, at worst, either subject to ‘sexual
hustling, fraternizing and paternalistic attitudes’; or in need of help and protection
(Brewer, 1991). In our fieldwork, Mac Giollabhuí was considered useful, particularly
when paired alongside a female officer; he would have become a potential liability had
he been partnered with a male officer. Loftus, equally, was almost invariably partnered
with male officers – and considered at least as useful, if not more so because of the innate
advantages that came with her gender.

Conclusion
There is marked imbalance in our academic understanding of the police, which is tilted
heavily towards the organization and culture of uniformed officers. We still know very
little about the values, attitudes and informal rules that apply in the world of covert polic-
ing. There is, as Punch points out, a pressing need for ‘ethnographers to scrutinize detec-
tive work and specialized units’ (cited in Marks, 2004: 866). In our research, we set out
to redress this imbalance by conducting the first comprehensive ethnographic field study
of covert police investigation in the UK. We undertook an ethnography of the subject
because this method has ‘special qualities suited to dealing with controversial topics in
sensitive locations, for it entails a gradual and progressive contact with respondents over
time, and for researchers to participate in the full range of experiences involved in the
topic’ (Brewer, 1991: 18). This study provides an important contribution to our under-
standing of covert police investigation, not only because it provides a situated account of
the controversial world of covert surveillance, but also because it provides an insight into
how an ethnography of covert policing might differ from equivalent ethnographies of
uniformed officers.

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14 Qualitative Research 

We set out to penetrate fronts – in Douglas’s (1976) memorable phrase – during our time
with Specialist Operations and other units in the Summershire Police service. And, in the
course of our investigation, we discovered that our experience as ethnographers of covert
policing had some interesting similarities to other police ethnographers. We faced a similar
set of challenges, building trust with our research participants, who viewed our presence
with a great deal of suspicion. We also negotiated the highly secretive environment in a
way that is familiar to all police officers: dealing with tests of allegiance, engaging in ‘eas-
ing behaviour’, and confronting the conventional suspicion among ordinary officers that
we were management spies. In other respects, however, our experience was distinctly
novel: we became active participants in the conduct of surveillance operations – not
because of any creeping desire to act as ‘fan’ or ‘voyeur’ of our research participants (Van
Maanen, 1988) – but, instead, because the job demanded it. We also discovered that our
active participation in the maintenance of the surveillance units’ cover activated our own
demographic characteristics in an unexpected way: our gender became an important com-
ponent of our cover within the surveillance teams and, in turn, an essential part of our
reflexive experience as ethnographers.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. For the purposes of this article, we take criminal investigation to refer to the set of processes
and procedures that govern the collection of evidence and construction of the case for prosecu-
tion following the commission of a criminal offence. Covert investigation generally refers to a
situation where the subject of a police investigation is assumed to be unaware they are under
surveillance and that the investigation may infringe upon their private life (Sharpe, 2002).
2. For a more detailed discussion about the contribution of ethnographic studies in police stud-
ies, see Van Maanen, 1979; Holdaway, 1983; Punch, 1989; Reiner and Newburn, 1992;
Marks, 2004.
3. Summershire is, in many respects, a typical English constabulary: reported crime is slightly
above the national average; the territory includes both rural and urban areas; and it has a
diverse socio-economic and ethnic population. It is one of the largest constabularies in
England and Wales both in terms of territory and the size of the police workforce.
4. See oral evidence of Assistant Chief Constable Nick Gargan to the House of Lords, Select
Committee on the Constitution’s report, ‘Surveillance: Citizens and the State’.
5. This suspicion, as one of our anonymous reviewers underlined, is perhaps the single most
common suspicion held by research participants about ethnographic researchers (Sluka,
2012).
6. Trap cars (also known as bait cars) are unmarked vehicles parked with high-value items (such
as a laptop or satellite navigation system) deliberately left on show in areas where there has
been a spate of vehicle thefts or break-ins.

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Author biography
Shane Mac Giollabhuí is a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin.
His major research interest lies in the field of political parties, African politics, and criminology.
He has published articles in a number of journals, including Party Politics, African Affairs, and the
British Journal of Criminology.
Bethan Loftus is Senior Lecturer in Criminal Justice and Social Policy at Bangor University. She
is the author of Police Culture in a Changing World (Oxford University Press, 2009) and articles
in major journals such as the British Journal of Criminology and Theoretical Criminology.
Benjamin J Goold is a Professor at the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.
His major research interests include privacy rights, the use of surveillance technologies by the
police and intelligence communities, and the rhetoric and language of human rights. He is the author
of numerous works on privacy, surveillance, and security, including CCTV and Policing (Oxford
University Press) and Security and Human Rights (Hart Publishing; edited with Liora Lazarus).

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