I HIGHLY recommend his book 'Good Cop Bad War', especially if you're interested in what fighting the war on drugs does to an emphatic human being. Still need to read his second book! As a former drug addict Niel Woods is my hero - a cop that understands drug addicts are people who hate their life but without the drugs have extreme & life-consuming trauma & mental illness and don't have the money or resources to get them treated. And that criminalising instead of treating addicts is just pushing them further and further from ever having a normal life. Everyone is telling you it's your fault you're addicted when you yourself HATE it, your life is constant danger, violence, betrayal, death & poverty and you've tried to get clean hundreds of times but it never lasts because there's always a deep psychological problem that causes you to become a heroin addict in the first place - no one, ever, has said when I grow up I want to be a heroin addict. There's no heroin addict doesn't hate their life, no heroin addict that doesn't desperately want to quit. Most heroin addicts don't even enjoy taking heroin, it's not a pleasant drug, especially compared to others, but it's the ultimate pain reliever, moreso mentally than physically, it just makes you feel blank, removes the emptiness, depression & PTSD symptoms. I got very lucky and got psychiatrically detained (for about the 7th time) but that time got put in a private psychiatric hospital with weekly therapy, something I'd never had access to before even after probably 18 months of time in psychiatric hospitals behind me. Without that I could never have got clean. Not a chance. I've been clean 14 months now and I'm happy for the first time in my life. I still have PTSD flashbacks and nightmares every day, a lot of them from the experiences I had while addicted to drugs (it's a brutal and violent life where you know you're going to die soon, and friends are dying constantly, sometimes in front of your eyes, from overdose & murder but you don't care because death is better than being trapped in the life you have now). But I made it to age 30 and I'm still alive! Which is something that for 17 years I lived in absolute certainty that that could never happen. Niel Woods in his book talks about finding out while undercover in Brighton that addicts were being murdered for introducing undercover police to dealers (thinking the were just another junky who was from out-of-town and going through withdrawals). He informs the local police chief of this and he doesn't care at all about junkies dying, even when it's murder. I lost a lot of friends to overdose but nearly as many to murder and oftentimes we knew exactly who'd done it (nearly always county-lines drugs dealers from London) and the police had everything they needed for a successful prosecution but they never, not once, investigated it properly and never once charged anyone. Of course because of that the dealers felt like they could kill people at will with no risk so they did it a lot. Often over very minor things like a £20 debt or one time someone they were forcing to move the drugs for them between the flat they were in and the alley they were sending customers to coming back just £5 short because he'd not counted the money properly ("busting the shots" ie selling the bags to people is a very high-risk, high-stress thing and addicts regularly manage to confuse the dealer or the person the dealer is forcing to "run" the drugs to the "spot"). They even killed his dog too. But the way the police didn't regard the murder of our friends and what was essentially our community as human lives worthy of having any care about very much deeply sums up how you're looked at as an addict and how much you're trapped by your addiction, cos it feels like no one but your drug and other junkies will ever care about you, or treat you as a human being. If you've read to here then thank you. If you want to help a human being then next time you get asked for money on the street don't give them money, give them love & respect; sit with a beggar and talk to them, find out about them, treat them as a human being with their own interests, personality, hopes, fears, humour and problems. And please don't try to sympathise with how hard their life must be, they want someone to treat them normally; if you do they will probably act like you can't understand how hard their life is or what they've been through and that's because cos you probably can't. You probably wouldn't expect to be able to relate to the suffering a child soldier has been through so why should you be able to relate to someone whose life had also been death violence, death and abuse in it from a young age. Please also remember they might be withdrawing and don't have time to talk to you because they need to make money as quickly as possible. Please don't be offended by this because withdrawals are like a parasite that controls your brain; you can't think of anything other than getting well again. But most of the time that person is going to be so so glad to talk to someone who doesn't look down on them, or preach to them, or focus on their addiction and how hard their life must be, but instead just talks to them like another human being with aspirations and interests and stories, who gives them a name and a face and a personality rather than just seeing them as another faceless beggar they walk past every day but never even acknowledge. This is what will help them. If you get to know some addicts and find out they're actually decent people who are suffering and want to help even more then you can find your local substance abuse/misuse services and volunteer your money or time. Studies have shown addiction is formed from a lack of care from other humans (especially at a young age), so the person bonds with a drug to alleviate the lack of bonds with other humans. Just a conversation can help rebuild a shattered bridge between an addict and society and take them one step closer to believing they are with knowing and could live a normal life if they kick their addiction. Thank you.
A wall of text written by people smarter than you doesn't change the fact that it's a choice. Even without help many trauma victims cope without drugs. You chose to shoot up, knowing it's a crime, and whatever you did under the excuses of "I'm an addict/high/victim" doesn't exonerate you. You are not a victim, addicts make victims. Decriminalization only creates more victims, what we need is enforcement, cops rarely arrest junkies so many weak people take drugs knowing them will be seen as a "victim". Enforce it and less people will take the risk of ever starting.
Honestly an inspiring read, you should be proud of yourself for the progress you made. I want to go check out that book now, this is a real eye opener on something I admittedly hadn't thought about much before.
@Gavin B. Hi Gavin. Yes thanks - coming up for 23 months, so nearly two years, clean soon & I feel so far from that world now I can't imagine going back anymore. Got my life together, am a productive member of society which feels absolutely amazing, to be contributing, paying taxes & working, and I'm teaching myself Mandarin, I could never have done that before. Have made a lot of new friends & the biggest step has been I've learnt to trust people, that outside of that world I don't have to assume negative intentions in everyone I meet or that everyone I'm around, no matter how well I know them, is probably playing an angle for their own advantage & would drop you in a moment if you're inconvenient. The sad thing about that is too that a lot of people who are clean (not just strangers, most dealers have this attitude too) assume because you're homeless & an addict that anything about you can be bought or sold, that you have no principles or that drugs are the only thing that matters or will ever matter to you. There's a few out there that maybe that's true for, but even then that's because they made that choice along the way. Being an addict is like doing terrible things constantly while also trying to insist to yourself you're a decent and moral person, you can't ever let go of that belief really, despite the evidence. It's got its own internal logic & morality in a way, and you are far from just being available to the whims of the highest bidder. But yeah learning to trust people has been the biggest step & the longest journey. It took a lot of believing people were out to screw me over & finding out they weren't to get it back. And it took a long time to feel like people would see me as someone equal & someone valued, not like I had this black mark on my forehead. Anyway, thanks so much for reading, just that really makes a difference. I think if there were more people who genuinely wanted to hear addict's stories, their real stories warts & all, not the noble, rose-tinted version that we had to tell to beg for money or to avoid being judged (or often just because we were ashamed of ourselves, our choices & our lives) then that'd go a long, long, way towards healing the broken people on the streets, the people addicted to crack & heroin. Because living every day knowing it's not very likely you'll last much longer & feeling relieved & comforted by that - that's a very broken human being. So thank you. Words cannot describe how lucky & how grateful I was to be given a way to get out. I still bump into and talk to people from that life all the time (none of which have shown anything at all but the greatest genuine happiness for me for doing it or any hint of wanting to pull me back in) and honestly I feel so much pain when I see them, even the ones who screwed me over or did me wrong, because they're all people to me: people I laughed & joked with, people I talked to for hours sat in alleyways in the rain waiting for dealers, or in hidden spots just out of the public eye to use, learning about them, what their story was, what they were good at, what they had wanted to do with their life, where things had first gone wrong and where things finally went wrong - every conversation like that is always had in the sense of the final: this is where our life has ended & all our ambitions, hobbies, things we care about are in the past now and can never be returned, life's just a slow suicide from here on. I think that sums up what it's like more than anything and I wish there was a clear path for every user to see & take that led to getting clean & getting out, and actually doing it for good. Thanks again, I really appreciate you taking your time out of your day to read it, and even more for actually hearing it. Sorry for the long message again, it's really difficult to talk about this stuff without a lot of words, if that makes sense... All the best to you Gavin.
I like that instead of just bashing some of the more unrealistic films, he actually acknowledged the reasons why those decisions were made for that particular medium
@AeneasGemini Well, to be fair. There isnt a single movie that is completly accurate about how crimminals and police actually works.. Closest one i have ever seen is the swedish film series, Johan Falk. It isnt accurate, but close enough accurate and no other movie that ive seen, anyways. Dosnt even come close...
@Brad Rozycki i wish I could say no such people exist in the world, or that there aren’t far too many people who are actually ignorant enough to be unable to distinguish reality from fiction. Unfortunately we do live in a society where people are so unable to distinguish between what is or isn’t real, that they will send death threats to actors who play despicable characters in a fictional story.
No, Neil more likely has never even seen the Tarantino "Inglorious Basterds" film or else he would have stated the obvious even though it's is already the acknowledged correct answer - The German hand signal for "3" is different than the English one...
@john smithfrom the way he described in the other video (LADBible's), the "speed" he had was a very different substance than the "speed" we know today - some sort of 90s era, illegally-produced, research chemical nonsense that looked bad and smelled worse. seems like it was way more potent than Adderall.
Someone in my family was an undercover guy decades ago during the cocaine wars in Chicago. Put a ton of mob guys away. To this day, he's the hardest man in the world to read. This guy's comments about knowing your anecdotes are dead-on. My family member (I'm being intentionally vague since mafia promised to kill him and his family) can lie about virtually any topic. He's told stories that I still don't know the veracity of. It's as if lying is a sport to him. Don't get the wrong idea, he doesn't lie maliciously like most people. He just sees what ridiculous stories he can get people to believe. And he wears a straight face at all times. Never seen him crack once. Until he starts to feel bad that you're being duped. Really interesting part of policing. Takes a special kind of person.
This guy is a hero and also has a common sense approach to decriminalising drugs. He’s someone who’s spent his career fighting the war on drugs and has the balls to highlight the absurdity of it.
It's funny because it's always been everything more than a street racing franchise and people always cry for them to go back or the basics but the basics is drama, action, and thriller (and comedy of course), so the movies have evolved exactly how they should've.
I think Lethal Weapon should have gotten 10/10. He said himself, “That would be a good way to get yourself killed.” And In that part of the movie he was actually trying to get himself killed.
Yeah. Oftentimes in these videos a scene is graded as inaccurate because the characters aren't following best practices, but in context there's absolutely a reason for them to not do things correctly.
"The trouble is: It's a half a trillion dollar industry worldwide, and that inevitably causes corruption" - Man literally describes problems far outside of the illegal drug trade.
I love the way he discussed with Jason Bourne how the inaccuracies were in the context of communicating to an audience in a visual media. It’s a great way to approach a judgement of accuracy
Yeah but in the context of this movie I'm pretty sure he grabbed a random phone as a burner And Bourne is never undercover, he's always evading being caught lol
Plot twist: He is an undercover CIA agent posing as an ex undercover cop, meeting a producer in Insider who is a CIA agent, but that's just what the CIA thinks.
My biggest problem with the Fast and Furious is the guy who does the engineering Jesse, F1 Prize money is like $36 million USD prize money and that is just for winning one race, never mind the engineering and peripheral technology design and patents it can generate. If the guy was as good at designing engines as he is supposed to be in the movies, there is no way street racing could make him the kind of money that being in Formula 1 could provided. He could easily be making 175,K a year , plus a percentage of prize money , plus some patent or percentage of the team , if he was as good as the movie makes him out to be. Adrian Newey has something like 10 million.
I really liked this a lot. You can tell this man has been exactly there in the siutation, where it more like talking to the school bullies than making an incredible story up. Try to fit in, be normal, be yourself .. those are the things.
It would be interesting to hear where the line between "preserving life" and "never break cover" is - it seems that most situations you'd find yourself in would mean the decision wouldn't be easy, I suppose "preserve your own life" would need to be factored in.
I gotta say, I really like this guy. I hope he comes back. He explains concepts of his work eloquently and comprehensively. I wish he was my teacher, thats how good he is at explaining.
@NeverEnoughPyro40 you really missed the point of what he said. did you miss the part when he said "you have to be sensitive to colloquialisms." or maybe you don't know what that means. he pointed out two things. his main point was that he (Fassbender) lost the confidence in his cover when he reacted to the hostility of the guy who noticed the unusual gesture he made therefore subtly giving himself away to somebody who was ALREADY suspicious of him. then after the fact he (the ex undercover cop) is saying yes he needs to make sure he knows and emulates the local behaviours (colloquialisms) BUT if someone is ALREADY suspicious of you they will instantly confront you about any little misstep especially obvious ones as you have rightly proven their suspicion. Unlike someone who is not suspicious of you, who may overlook it and may or may not think about it at a later time, maybe think it odd but not think too much about it as they would be distracted by how convinced they are of all the other things about you that look the part (of the role that you are playing).
@NeverEnoughPyro40 It was thumb, index finger and middle finger. Saw it in another one of these videos, the one with the former CIA chief of disguise. Plus I'm European and I do it like that :P
For me, the scene in Fast and Furious, where Brian breaks undercover to save Vince, has always stood out as one of the best scenes in movie. Such good scene, and amazing done by the cast, director of photography and director...
It’s interesting because ‘being a different version of yourself’ and ‘using your own imagination’ is the essence of good acting. Good acting is never just pretending or imitating.
4:30 - THIS is scary stuff! Imagine how many police officers whom are dirty. There's virtually no control whom enter the police academy as long as you don't have a criminal record.
There's all kinds of control on who enters the "Police academy" in the UK a person is vetted financially as well as criminally, throughout training candidates are monitored. Corruption isn't widespread and tends to come about from poor impulse control from cops (who develop bad habits or have bad 'friends.')
Having read the book recently, I can help you out but most of it isn't much to say afterards. He was working undercover in Northampton, pretended to be a desperate drug addict in need of a fix but no contact with a dealer, offered half his buy to another addict. He just used them to try make contact with a dealer then to maintain his cover he went with them to shoot it up, abandoned industrial estate building somewhere, he noticed all these details about these 3 people, who he just randomly got in with for 1 fix, after they injected he kept an eye on them for about 15 minutes ready to call for help if something happened then ushered them out of there back onto the streets so he could get away and move on with the operation. That is all that happened really. Only thing I remember he said was "He probably expects all 3 of those people to be dead by now".
@Biscuit Gidoni it wasn’t his dick, it was his groin. It would have been into the artery in his inner thigh because his veins were shot. I don’t understand what he meant by not using a filter as they’d have just used a cigarette filter, reused one of the others or split it in two.
I'm assuming the one guy didnt have an embolism and die instantly - as he was afraid would happen. Probably did within a few weeks after though, if you're that far gone just a single stroke of bad luck and it's over.
As a German speaker, The first time I watched the in inglorious Bastard scene, I knew Michael Fassenbender was going to be toast. That sign thing was very authentic.
The bit where Mel "tastes" the drugs to see if they're legit, every time I see similar scenes in movies it always reminds me of the Robert Di Niro scene in Showtime when Wil Shatner is showing the cops how to check the drugs by tasting it and Di Niro's character, looking very unimpressed, simply says "What if it's cyanide?"
Neil is a really cool bloke, he speaks alot about the catastrophe that is the war on drugs, which he was on the frontlines of. Follow his twitter! Extremely reasonable voice in the fight for decriminalization
The main point he made is once he put the Burger Bar Boys away another gang took over thier territory in a couple of days, they had much more power and more resources, so simply the act of busting a gang means there is more money for corruption and more power and resources for the surviving gangs, which is what has happened in Mexico. There used to be dozsens of cartels in Mexico now there is basically two main ones and they have never been richer with more resorce and more capacity for corruption. This is why gang will inform on other gangs. It does all the work for them. James Whitey Bulger did exactly this, and this is why he was able to avoid being jailed for so long, until policy changed within the FBI. Cartel do no want legalisation as crime is their profit margin.
@Kind Old Raven no of course not all drugs are the same, but it shouldn't be illegal to use any drug, decriminalization is about not putting drug addicts in jail and instead giving them the help they need, that way taking buisness and money from drugdealers. It's not about winning the "war on drugs" You never could it's about not playing at all.
@asdfghjkl9260 No, he just means that you can't *win* the war on drugs. You can't stop people providing what people want (or need) and especially not when there's loads of money to be made (fairly) easily. And, even though it's not as simple as the next example, a lot of people think decriminilisation would be preferable, as that has freed up quite a lot of spots in jail from people who were locked up due to cannabis-related crimes for instance. I get how people think, but I do believe every drug is its own thing and you can't just say ''drugs are bad'' or ''drugs are okay''. Comparing cannabis to magic mushrooms to heroin just doesn't fly in my book. They're all totally different things.
The way he so casually glosses over events that would reasonably cause any normal person a lifetime of nightmares makes me think that maybe my life isn't so bad after all.
09:59 I know it is a little nitpick, but IIRC he bought burner phones from a kiosk right off the street. Bourne Ultimatum came out right before Bluetooth headsets became a thing. Seeing someone with an earpiece going to a cellphone wouldn’t have been that unusual at the time and he had to improvise with the tools available to him. He is a rogue spy and has no support at all, so he has to improvise. The pulling up his lapel to talk is still dumb though.
I was a cop in the NYC suburbs for 23 years. They tried to recruit me into narcotics for the same reason they tried to recruit me into narcotics during the 4 years I was in the Military police corps because I was black. I declined the same offers in my suburban department, due to my military experience and directed the recruiters to other black officers who were "ambitious" and not 6'5" 220 lbs clean-cut professional police officers as was I. The cop in the vid looks like a weasel (all of the narcs I know look like him), so he would be excepted a lot more readily among dealers. I had also worked on Rikers Island for 3 years after the military and all of the organized crime inmates I had basically said "what are you doing working here, you should be on the streets working with decent people" I was just waiting for the suburban test I took to be certified. One Latino guy that I went through the suburban academy with and had worked with me on Rikers and took the test for NYPD and declined when called and our suburban department. as I did We were talking and I said to him "If we took the NYPD job they would have put me in East NY , and you in the South Bronx". He responded "F**k that, I'm Puerto Rican but I wasn't going to tell them I speak Spanish"my name sounds Italian and I look white.
You find the media confuse it, which may also be part of the problem. E.g. 'the suspect was arrested by undercover plain clothes police'. Detectives aren't undercover (as you point out), they identify themselves when they have to, they make arrests and they work together or in teams. No so for undercover police officers.
Shame he didn't talk more about ID at the end. Based on a true story, the undercover cop went mad and turned into a real football hooligan. Amazing film.
Funny thing about the anecdote from "Reservoir Dogs" is, that this story actually happened to me about 25 years ago. So now everytime I tell the story of me having been "caught" having weed on me by a police dog, who then got yelled at by "his" police officer, because the cop didn't think I was looking like somebody having weed on him, people will say "Nah, you got that one from that Tarantino movie". Fortunately I am not a gangster, as other gangsters would immediately think I was an undercover cop if I'd tell them the story. ^^
Me: “The guy looks as clean cut and business like with such an honest face. How the heck can he be undercover officer?” 5:29 Somehow transforms to look more like a criminal than the guy he is busting.
I would have wanted him to explain how you would reconcile preserving your false identity vs exposing yourself as a cop in order to save someone's life. Like if you see your buddy gunned down do you possibly let him die in order to stay undercover? Youd have to forego preserving life then...
Some people seem confused by the Inglorious Bastards scene. In Germany when we signal "3", we use thumb, index and middle finger, not index, middle and ring. So it would seem extremely odd, that someone signals three like that. And we signal it in places like bars due to the noise, as 2 and 3 can sound quite similar (which is why ie in the military you'd sometimes say Zwo instead of Zwei over radio etc, so they can understand you better).
@El-Kwako The Grumpy Duck read the comments, plenty of slow people. Which is why Democracy is clearly overrated, when you consider that if they can't understand this, they clearly can't understand complex policy issues...
@Ben B Yes, or maybe Anglos are just stupid with cripple hands? If you count on your hand, do you start "1" with thumb or index? It's also uncomfortable imo to make the 3 the anglo way.
Great review but Argo wasn’t really about undercover work. It was just about giving false identities to people in order to smuggle them out of a country.
7:26 So he's right about Rigg's method would get someone killed but I thought that was the point of his character, that he had a death wish and was doing everything to get into harm's way (though I guess you'd have to watch the rest of the movie to see that and this is an isolated incident).
@Chikako. I don't think it was recorded, it was a talk in Oxford at a small event in a pub. Organised by a group called Sceptics In The Pub. If you check them out, they might have some footage
"The ethics of undercover policing is quite straightforward. You remain a police officer, so your first priority is still to preserve life" Maybe the US shouldn't have broke away from Britain
Serpico is a true story, it had nothing to do with the beginning of undercover work, or undercover work per se, it's a story about an honest cop in a corrupt department. Frank Serpico wasn't under cover he was working plain clothes.
Maaaan, that Deep Cover movie was really good!! I saw it once, back in the 90s and forgot all about it until seeing a clip of it here. I still remember one of "Larry" Fishburne's lines from that film. He was on a date with a girl, explaining his rise in the drug world. He says to her "I went from almost nothing to almost something."
I do not think that Mr Woods realises the scene from ARGO is depicting a rescue by the Canadian government of six American diplomats who had evaded capture during the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran. The thing was the Americans had to " pass" as Canadian they were not professional undercover personnel.
I liked the interviewee, but, 1/2 of the examples seem to be undercover intelligence, not undercover enforcement. Different worlds. Pretty sure you could have found more enforcement examples and then done an intelligence video later on.
7:30 good observation that "it would be a way to get killed" since Riggs was actively trying to get killed on duty in that part of the franchise. Just an 80's action movie, but nonetheless, good catch :)
i really love the comments about the Bourne scene, because nowadays, I couldnt imagine myself walking round in a place like that without my earphones in, mind you, i dont need to hold them to my face when im on a call, tech really is changing the game.
I find it funny that he rates "Argo" as he does, considering that the folk that are being drilled aren't police officers, they're essentially Civilians, and the only guy there that's part of any kind of undercover agency is CIA, and the husband of the CIA Disguise Expert that shows up on the "Wired" channel every so often XD And she praises this movie, as I recall.
This gentleman would have been better served with context on some of these scenes. The scene from Rush, for example, is documenting the brainwashing of Kristen by Jim, who at this point in the story is a still functioning heroin addict. The movie is set in the early to mid 70's, so what was said of Serpico also applies to Rush in some measure.
Surprised Donnie Brasco wasn't included in this. Also would have loved to see him review Netflix's "The Spy" where Sasha Baron Cohen played Eli Cohen, a Mossad agent undercover in Syria in the 60s.
@5:54 I believe the give-away was that he used three fingers instead of 2 fingers and a thumb to denote the number three. Germans use the thumb, the spy didn't.
Did you watch the context of the movie Argo? They were US Embassy employees having to learn bios to pose as Canadian film crew to bluff their way out of Iran They weren't "undercover". That's why Alfec was quizzing them on their cover.
