Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

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Los Angeles jury convicts British man based on jailhouse informant

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Neil Revill was convicted today of a double murder based largely on the testimony of jailhouse informant Benjamin Chloupek. Revill was accused of killing a fellow meth user Arthur Davodian, who ironically was himself a police informer who may have given information to the police about Revill. Chloupek testifed that Revill confessed the details of the murder to him while they were incarcerated. Chloupek, whose substantial criminal record includes convictions for manslaughter and child abuse involving the death of an 18-month-old, “admitted approaching detectives with his account in the hope of obtaining a lenient sentence on a burglary case he was facing.”

The use of jailhouse informant witnesses in Los Angeles has become a rarity. After a scathing Grand Jury investigation in 1990 in which rampant abuses of informants were uncovered in the Los Angeles jail, the District Attorney’s office clamped down, creating new corroboration restrictions, a central jailhouse informant index and committee, and requiring high-level approval before such witnesses could be used. The District Attorneys office states that it has approved the use of jailhouse informant witnesses only six times since 2006. Here’s the Los Angeles Times story: Jailhouse informant plays a critical role in trial for a brutal double murder.

San Francisco to review snitch policy

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The San Francisco police department has announced that it is reviewing its use of criminal informants and will provide additional training to officers. The decision comes in the wake of allegations of misconduct against several officers. From the SF Examiner story:

Last Thursday, the day after allegations of illegal searches and seizures against six officers were made public and as gang tensions mounted in the Mission district, police station captains received a message on their department BlackBerrys to stop using confidential sources — known on the street as snitches — until further notice.

The directive came from the head of investigations, Cmdr. David Lazar, and was rescinded within an hour, according to interim police Chief Jeff Godown.

“It was an error,” he said. Lazar also acknowledged the mistake, calling it a “premature blast out.”

But before the order could be reversed, complaints rained down from captains. Capt. Greg Corrales was trying to stop retaliatory gang warfare in the Mission when the order came in. It would have made police work nearly impossible, Corrales said. The department announced that it will review its use of confidential informants this week and officers will receive additional training. . . . “Confidential informants are done on a daily basis and there are administrative issues,” Godown said. “We started looking into this months ago.”

Informant policies are often intimately associated with police misconduct, in part because informant use is secretive and easily subject to abuse. In the Los Angeles Rampart scandal, for example, police used informants to plant evidence and cover up police shootings. Part of the post-Rampart reform involved curtailing informant use by street officers. See Los Angeles Times story here: LAPD Eases Rules on Street Sources.

New article: “The Terrorist Informant”

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There is increasing public and media interest in the government’s use of terrorism informants, particularly with respect to issues of entrapment, and the impact on Muslim American communities. Professor Wadie Said at the University of South Carolina Law School has just published this article: The Terrorist Informant, 85 Washington Law Review 687 (2010), on this important subject. Here is the summary:

A man sets himself on fire in front of the White House in a dispute with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He has been working as an informant for the FBI in a high-profile terrorism prosecution and is unhappy with the $100,000 he has been paid so far. He has also been recently convicted of bank fraud. As a result, the government declines to call him as a witness, given the damage his actions have on his credibility and trustworthiness. This incident underscores the difficulty inherent in relying on paid informants to drive a prosecution, where material considerations such as money and legal assistance are often the price the government pays for an informant’s services. In the years since September 11, 2001, informants have been at the heart of many major terrorism prosecutions. The entrapment defense, perhaps the only legal tool available to defendants in such prosecutions, has proven ineffective. This is evident when one considers the context of generally heightened suspicion of the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States. Further, a closer look at several of these prosecutions reveals repeated instances of suggestive and provocative activity by informants geared at obtaining a conviction, calling into question whether a genuine threat to U.S. national security actually existed in the first place. This Article argues that the government should cease its current practice of using informants to generate terrorism prosecutions.

Bump Bump Bump

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The term ‘selective abstraction’ is used in psychology to describe a flawed or prejudicial way of thinking. What occurs in this type of cognitive bias is that a person takes detail out of context and believes that while everything else in context is ignored. In lay terms it is what is ‘cherry-picking’. In essence it is not reading the whole story but then basing an argument on the bits you have selected. It is about pointing out everything that is wrong in the way informants are managed and refusing to see the huge amount of good that is done through their use. It is about turning a blind eye to informants that have been mismanaged, pretending these were isolated incidents, then refusing to learn from them. It is a very human failing. We don’t want to see what is wrong on our side. We don’t want to or can’t see another perspective because maybe if we do it means acknowledging we have not been doing things as well as we could have.

When it comes to managing informants everywhere, including the US, there are problems but there is also a significant amount of good work being done and this needs to be recognised. Citizens need to realise how valuable a resource that informants are both in regard to our safety and to the criminal justice system. If a terrorist is intent in bombing our cities then let us hope that somewhere a police officer has an informant stuck in the middle of that plot. If someone is dealing drugs outside the high school where our children attend, then let us hope that a police officer has heard about it from an informant. If one of our children has become mixed up in gang violence then let us hope that a police officer hears about that before we end up burying that child. Every law abiding citizen should be encouraging others to give information about crime to law enforcement.

But all involved in the criminal justice system need to recognise that there are problems with the way in which informants are managed at present. This is not just about protecting the rights of citizens it is also about officer safety. While there are many progressive law enforcement agencies that are attempting to raise standards there is not a collective approach and as such those improvements are likely to have limited success. Is significant change possible? I believe it is and I have seen evidence of it within a number of forward thinking US law enforcement agencies. These include the major police department that has undertaken the training of every officer in relation to the risks involved in informant management, a police department involved proactively recruiting informants to address specific threats, agencies that are writing new and better policies and the sheriff’s department that has altered business processes and implemented a comprehensive software solution to provide full accountability in all informant cases – officers with objectivity and vision.

And for the rest, in simple terms, this is what I would suggest. A national working group should be set up including representation from federal, state, municipal and tribal law enforcement with the mandate of identifying new national definitions for all aspects of informant management and to produce binding standards of behaviour for informant management. The guidance produced should set the standard for every law enforcement agency. If legislative change is required then it should be done ensuring adequate protection for all involved including informants. All officers involved in the regular use of informants, including supervisors, should undergo mandatory training to a level that meets the amount of risk involved. (And this is not an afternoon in the classroom!). Each agency should be made to keep comprehensive records of all activities informants relating to informants. Such records should be kept to evidentiary standards and on use software designed for the function. Such records modify undesirable behaviours and provide the accountability that the public want. Academics have a role to play to in researching and developing methodology that can assist law enforcement and the criminal justice process as a whole. Legislators must provide good legislation and if the public want greater accountability then they have to be prepared to pay for the changes necessary. All the changes I suggest can be done and relatively easily if the desire is there. The professionals in this key area need to avoid the select abstraction that comes from their own camp and look at these matters in a broader and more objective manner. There are in essence only two sides, those who want to destroy society and the rest. It is time the rest maybe tried a bit harder to see each other’s perspective.

And that is about it for me. Thank you taking the time to read (hopefully all) I have written. You may disagree with some or all of it, however, in the words of the philosopher Samuel Johnson: ‘I have found you an argument but I am not obliged to find you understanding.’ Hopefully you are at least thinking it through. I believe that the management of informants is an essential part of law enforcement. It saves lives, prevents crime and brings many perpetrators to justice. But perhaps there is a better way to manage informants. As A A Milne wrote in The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh: ‘Hear is Edward Bear coming downstairs, bump, bump bump, on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he thinks that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a minute to think of it.’
John welcomes comments and can be contacted through his website www.hsmtraining.com.

“Secret Justice” article

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Here’s an article I wrote for Prison Legal News entitled “Secret Justice: Criminal Informants and America’s Underground Legal System.” The article is a brief overview of many of the themes I cover in the book–here’s the first paragraph:

Although it is almost invisible to the public, the use of criminal informants is everywhere in the U.S. justice system. From street corners to jails to courthouses to prisons, every year the government negotiates thousands of deals with criminal offenders in which suspects can avoid arrest or punishment in exchange for information. These deals typically take place off-the-record, subject to few rules and little oversight. While criminal informants-sometimes referred to as “snitches”-can be important investigative tools, using them has some serious costs: informants often continue to commit crimes, while the information they provide is infamously unreliable. Taken together, these facts make snitching an important and problematic aspect of the way America does justice.