Police Deception and Dishonesty The Logic of Lying

Cooperative relations steeped in honesty and good faith are a necessity for any viable society. This is especially relevant to the police institution because the police are entrusted to promote justice and security. Despite the necessity of societal honesty and good faith, the police institution has embraced deception, dishonesty, and bad faith as tools of the trade for providing security. In fact, it seems that providing security is impossible without using deception and dishonesty during interrogations, undercover operations, pretextual detentions, and other common scenarios. This presents a paradox related to the erosion of public faith in the police institution and the weakening of the police's legitimacy.

In Police Deception and Dishonesty, Luke William Hunt--a philosophy professor and former FBI Special Agent--seeks to solve this puzzle by showing that many of our assumptions about policing and security are unjustified. Specifically, they are unjustified in the way many of our assumptions about security were unjustified after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when state institutions embraced a variety of brutal rules and tactics in pursuit of perceived security enhancements. The police are likewise unjustified in their pursuit of many supposed security enhancements that rely on proactive deception, dishonesty, and bad faith. Hunt shows that there are compelling reasons to think that the police's widespread use of proactive deception and dishonesty is inconsistent with fundamental norms of political morality regarding fraud and the rule of law. Although there are times and places for dishonesty and deception in policing, Hunt evocatively illustrates why those times and places should be much more limited than current practices suggest.

Luke William Hunt is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama, where he teaches in the department's Jurisprudence Track. After graduating from law school, he was a law clerk for a federal judge in Virginia. He then worked as an FBI Special Agent in Virginia and Washington, D.C., followed by his doctoral work in philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing (Oxford, 2019) and The Police Identity Crisis: Hero, Warrior, Guardian, Algorithm (Routledge, 2021).

Preface
The Logic of Lying: Five Presumed Justifications for Police Dishonesty
Introduction: On Beating a Broken Bone with a Boot

PART I THE IVORY TOWER

1. Force and Fraud in the World (and the Nine Circles of Hell)
Five Questions and Answers Explored in Chapter 1
1. On the Nature of Law (and Cannibalism)
2. Universalistic Positive Morality (and Infanticide)

2. Good Faith Policing
Five Questions and Answers Explored in Chapter 2
1. Truth
2. Good Faith
3. Concrete Agreements and Fraud
4. Social Contracts and Institutional Good Faith

Interlude: From THE IVORY TOWER to THE STREET
Five Questions and Answers Explored in the Interlude
1. Values
2. Methods
3. Other Approaches
4. Trust

PART II THE STREET

3. Case Studies: Fraud and Deception as Law Enforcement Means
Five Questions and Answers Explored in Chapter 3
1. A Preliminary Objection and Case Study: International Ruse
2. Case study: Covering up
3. Case Study: Controlling Citizens
4. Case Study: Catching Criminals
5. Case Study: Coercing Confessions
6. Case Study: Convicting Citizens

4. Case Studies: Honesty, Transparency, and Democracy
Five Questions and Answers Explored in Chapter 4
1. A Preliminary Objection and Case Study: FISA Fiasco
2. Case Study: Pandemic Privacy and Third-Party-Opacity
3. Case Study: Investigating Anarchists and Abortionists
4. Case Study: Pre-crime

Epilogue: Beyond Basketball - From Proactive to Reactive
The Logic of Legitimacy: Five Justifications for Police Honesty

Index