Abstract
Those who study crime have long known that official U.S. government statistics such as the FBI Uniform Crime Reports underreport the true number of infractions. Since they are derived from the number of crimes that are reported to the police, the data cannot include acts of unreported crime. Another source of inaccuracy results when reported crimes are misclassified as one type when they are another type. Acts of violence may be reported as something other than murder when they should in fact appear in official statistics as acts of murder. This is because some perpetrators successfully disguise the true nature of their actions. It is this issue that serves as the focus of Covert Violence: The Secret Weapon of the Powerless.
Jack Levin and Julie Wiest’s exploratory analysis is based on a sample of 37 cases in the United States that were uncovered through a search of newspaper accounts between June 2017 and July 2020 “in which a death that was originally classified as something other than a homicide was subsequently reclassified as a homicide” (p. 6). The authors refer to the behavior in these cases as covert violence because persons who commit such acts intend them to be invisible, hidden, and not traceable back to themselves.
The book begins with a comparison of results from the study’s research sample with official government homicide statistics. Some interesting disparities are found. For example, FBI murder reports estimate that 74 percent of homicides involve firearms, but most of the homicides in the sample do not involve guns. Rather, the most common methods are poisoning, beating, and suffocation. In addition, the cases in the sample involve a higher percentage of female perpetrators and female victims than cases appearing in official data. From this starting point, the authors begin a broad discussion of the causes of covert violence, and of violence in general, and they offer theoretical conclusions along with policy recommendations for the reduction of violent crime.
This intriguing book offers an expanded way of looking at official murder data, but some of the conclusions that the authors present in their discussions of violence are necessarily speculative due to the nature of the sample and the need for more detailed linkages with the broader theoretical literature on deviance and social control. For example, the authors claim that covert violence has been overlooked by scholars, but the book does not consider the long tradition of sociological work on “social control from below” (Baumgartner 1984), nor does it discuss in detail the extensive literature on theories of delinquency, deviant behavior, and violence more broadly. Many actions that could constitute “the secret weapon of the powerless” are not included in the study’s definition of covert violence: for example, low-wage workers who intentionally slow the pace of work, those who steal items from their workplace, or employees who spread malicious rumors behind their bosses’ backs. This leads the reader to wonder how actions that result in death are different from less serious types of resistance and whether hidden (covert) acts stem from similar or different causes than visible (overt) acts.
A further issue is that the concept of violence is not clearly defined. The book speaks of covert violence as “acts of murder, mischief, and mayhem” (p. 1), but how these acts differ qualitatively from acts that are not murderous is left unspecified. The authors propose that a likely cause of covert violence is a power difference between the perpetrators of violence and their targets. They propose that “what most sets covert violence apart from nearly all other types is the passiveness of the actor’s aggression,” and they refer to those who engage in covert violence as “weak and powerless” (p. 2). But in which circumstances is action defined as overt or covert, and at what point does resistive action become violence? In addition, several of the cases in their sample apparently do not involve a powerless perpetrator and a powerful victim: for example, the poisoning of hospital patients by a nursing assistant, the beating death of a two-year-old child by his mother, or the suffocation of three young children by their mother because she was upset by their crying.
The authors suggest that acts of covert violence, and the powerlessness that drives them, are related to the social institutions in which they often occur. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to far-reaching and detailed discussions of covert and overt violence in families, educational institutions, the workplace, politics and government, health care, and the mass media (including social media).
The chapter on politics and government offers an example of the authors’ approach. It begins with a discussion of covert actions by opposing forces during wartime, including the distribution of disease-carrying blankets to Native Americans by the British in the 1760s, the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and German soldiers disguising themselves with American uniforms and vehicles to engage in sabotage in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. Among other covert acts discussed in this chapter are the poisoning of restaurants by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the 1980s and the multiple letter bombs sent by “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the September 11, 2001 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York City. The chapter concludes with the authors’ suggestion that the potential use of biological weapons by “an under resourced and power-deprived group or nation” is covert violence that could cause the deaths of millions of people (p. 88).
In the final chapter, the authors return to the issue of errors in crime data that result in some murders remaining undetected. They propose that covert violence may be reduced if (1) powerlessness is reduced in society at large, (2) bystanders and family members report suspicious behavior to the authorities (“see something, say something”), and (3) greater resources are provided to police for the detection of non-homicide crimes.
Covert Violence has two distinct parts, each with a separate focus. The first section of the book looks at covert acts of murder that are misclassified in official crime statistics. Reference is made to the 37 cases in the authors’ sample. The unit of analysis is the individual perpetrator. The second part of the discussion does not refer to the authors’ research sample but instead moves to a discussion of covert violence in general. Sometimes the unit of analysis is the individual, but more often it is the group, ranging from a small military unit to entire governments. Sometimes the covert action is murder, but other types of behavior are included as well. To the reader, it is sometimes not apparent how the second discussion is related to the first. The best chapters in the book hold to an analysis of powerless individuals who commit covert murder within social institutional contexts.
This wide-ranging book makes a fundamentally important point about the necessity of interpreting official murder statistics with caution, and for this reason Covert Violence should be required reading for all criminal justice scholars. However, the book is not about covert and overt violence as studied in the social science literature. Fundamentally, it is concerned with the limitations of official murder statistics.
Ultimately, the book is more a study of “covert killers” (p. 6) than of people involved in all types of covert violence. It offers only limited discussion of the psychological and sociological causes of this type of action, and the methodology of the study does not unambiguously support some of the conclusions that the authors draw about the causes of violence. Despite these limitations, the book succeeds in identifying a little-understood type of measurement error in official homicide and murder statistics by pointing out that an unknown number of deaths that have been classified as something other than murder may in fact be murder, and that some such actions may involve hidden violence committed by relatively powerless people and groups against more powerful targets. This is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on officially reported crime.