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This is my last post as a guest blogger. I have greatly enjoyed the opportunity to think deeply about the problems of snitching and policing. Today I want to thing about the dangers inherent in becoming an informant.

The stop snitching movement normally focuses on the cost of snitching to the community. However, two recent cases suggest that the cost of informing can be high because the police insufficiently protect their informants. In the most recent case, from Missoula, Montana, police officers reportedly pressured Colton Peterson, a mentally ill marijuana grower to “work as a ‘cooperative defendant,’ gathering string on potentially more serious drug dealers in the area, and in exchange police would tell prosecutors he had cooperated with the investigation.” Peterson committed suicide, in part, his family claim, because of the pressure to snitch. In another case, police in Tallahassee, Florida, arrested Rachel Hoffman, a college student, “for drug possession and … g[a]ve[ her] the opportunity to avoid multiple felony charges by acting as a confidential informant for the police.” She was told to purchase drugs, including cocaine, from local drug dealers, but was killed during the undercover operation.

In each case, the police appeared to be more concerned to turn non-violent marijuana users into snitches than ensure their safety. In each case, vulnerable young individuals were preyed upon by police not simply to turn states evidence, but to go back into the field as undercover informants, in Hoffman’s case to buy harder drugs than she used, as well as to purchase a handgun. In each instance, the police were criticized for their lack of training in using informants.

Thanks again to Alexandra Natapoff for the opportunity to contribute to this blog.

A recent snitching-related phenomenon has seen citizens secretly recording police activity. Different types of recording devices have been used, from the omnipresent mobile phone, to cameras mounted in cars or, in a recent case filed in Maryland, a motorcycle helmet. The police, however, are fighting back: in Maryland, an officer caught on a tape posted on YouTube sued the arrestee under a wiretap statute for recording the encounter that led to the arrest.

While the judge ultimately threw out the case, the Maryland police are not alone in arresting individuals who record or watch them do their job. In fact, the subtext of a recent Supreme Court case, Devenpeck vs. Alford, 543 U.S. 146 (2004) concerned a police officer who (wrongfully) arrested a suspect for tape recording the arrest.

Citizens taping cops can fit the definition of snitching, if the citizen plans to use the tape to gain lenience or drop the charge. It also fits one scenario in which subjects have proved more willing to inform on lawbreakers: when the wrongdoer is a police officer.

Why do the police react so negatively to citizen video-taping? After all, the police themselves use dashboard-mounted cameras in police cars that capture traffic stops. In part, the police do so because they believe having an accurate record of the stop will most often support the officer’s version of events and undermine some of the negative attitudes towards the police.

One reason might be that citizen-sponsored videotaping (as opposed to police-sponsored taping) is a direct challenge to police control and authority. Since much of the stop-snitching phenomenon is a reaction to community perceptions of antagonistic policing or forcible policing that distances the police from the community and uses criminal informants to target low level crimes, citizen videotaping is a means of redressing the balance, by creating a record of what the police, in fact, do.

Police overreaction to citizen videotaping is best understood as a demand for a display of respect for and deference to the police. It highlights the distinction between consensual policing, of the sort that treats citizens with respect as equals, and the sort of adversarial posture that relies on criminal informants to the detriment of communication and community relations.

Here’s a snitching development from New South Wales, in Australia:

“The New South Wales Government says criminals who give evidence against other criminals will not automatically get reduced sentences because of the hardship they suffer in jail.

Attorney-General John Hatzistergos says they will get a discount for providing information to police but not an additional discount for the extra hardship they may suffer.”

The New South Wales system gave two automatic discounts to jailhouse informants. These might be characterized as the direct and collateral benefits for informing (on the lines of direct and collateral penalties at sentencing). The direct benefit was time off for the nature and quality of the information given; the collateral benefit was to compensate them for hardships suffered through requiring protective custody. Like direct and collateral penalties, one is clearly related to the criminal’s act (in the case of punishment, the crime; in the case of informing, cooperation with the government); another is regarded as regulatory in nature. In the case of punishment, there is a whole range of collateral penalties, ranging from losing the right to vote, to deportation (for eligible foreign nationals), to losing public housing, health care or welfare eligibility. In the case of informing, New South Wales treats protective custody as regulatory, and so as a matter of ensuring safety and security within prisons, rather than as an additional punishment consequent to informing.

It is unlikely that the American system would treat this type of direct/collateral benefit as legally significant. After all, the decision to reward the informant with some sentencing recommendation is well within the discretion of the prosecutor. And it’s well established that decisions regarding protective custody are regulatory rather than punitive. But New South Wales apparently had a mandatory award of time off for informants for protective custody. Apparently, the state’s rethinking of that policy reflects a tough on crime attitude on the part of prosecutors that is now catching up on prison informants.