Cognitive Bridges: The Case of High School Undercover Officers

Abstract

This article explores the problem of social integration from a position of isolation. It uses the experiences of high school undercover officers to consider the problem conceptually. Officers must move from new student to peer to drug purchaser without any informant assistance and with severe time constraints. Three specific techniques are used to trigger this process: class clowning, retreatism, and troublemaking. Each is a variation on the single theme of rebellion. I argue that these techniques generate interpersonal familiarity from a distance by creating reputations that drug dealers identify with and vest legitimacy in. Reputation substitutes for introductions informants could otherwise give, establishes a pretransaction comfort zone, and lays the interpersonal groundwork officers need before they can solicit drugs. Officers' behavior is conceptualized through the notion of a cognitive bridge, a hybrid of interactionist and microstructural principles. Data are drawn from interviews with thirty undercover officers who operate from a large western U.S. municipality. Effective undercover officers must be good thespians. Through dramaturgical methods, they induce targeted offenders into believing dissembled identities are real ones. Doing this without the help of an informant can be a daunting task. Familiar to the subculture, informants vouch for officers' legitimacy and ease their way into association with offenders (Brown 1985; Williams and Guess 1981). Without informants, officers must use their own interpersonal skills to move from subcultural outcast to peer. High school undercover narcs, police officers who pose as new students seeking to buy drugs from dealers, face this microstructural dilemma.