Isaiah Wall was 19 and, according to his friends and his phone, working as a police informant. He was killed by a gunshot to his head. The Idaho State Police have not acknowledged whether he was working for them, or whether his death was related to his undercover activities. Here is the ongoing investigation: Unfinished Business.
Drug-related
10th anniversary of Kathryn Johnston’s informant-related death
In 2006, Atlanta police shot and killed Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old grandmother. Her death–which involved the botched and illegal use of numerous informants–triggered a national inquiry into informant use, a Congressional hearing, and several criminal prosecutions. This CNN retrospective looks back at the story and the reforms that Atlanta has instituted since then. Here is a link to the original 2007 congressional hearing.
DOJ audit of DEA confidential source program
The U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General has just released this audit of the DEA’s Confidential Source Program. In a rare glimpse into the scope and scale of informant deployment, the audit states: “Between October 1, 2010, and September 30, 2015, the DEA had over 18,000 active confidential sources assigned to its domestic offices, with over 9,000 of those sources receiving approximately $237 million in payments.”
The audit was critical of the DEA. Here are a few excerpts:
- “[W]hile DEA policy prohibits paying deactivated sources who were deactivated because of an arrest warrant or for committing a serious offense, we found two concerning instances of payments to previously-deactivated sources. In one case, the DEA reactivated a confidential source who previously provided false testimony in trials and depositions. During the approximate 5-year period of reactivation, this source was used by 13 DEA field offices and paid $469,158. More than $61,000 of the $469,158 was paid after this source was once again deactivated for making false statements to a prosecutor. . . . [W]e estimated the DEA may have paid about $9.4 million to more than 800 deactivated sources between fiscal years (FY) 2011 and 2015.”
- “[W]e were extremely concerned to discover the DEA condoned its confidential sources’ use of “sub-sources,” who are individuals a source recruits and pays to perform activities or provide information related to the source’s work for the DEA. During our review of DEA files, we found evidence of sources who were paid based, in part, on the need to pay “sub-sources,” but the information in the files was insufficient to allow us to determine the full extent of such payments.”
- “[W]hen we asked the DEA Intelligence Division to provide us with an itemized list and overall total of payments to intelligence-related confidential sources, it was unable to do so. We reviewed DEA records and estimated that, during the 5-year period of our review, the Intelligence Division paid more than $30 million to sources who provided narcotics-related intelligence and contributed to law enforcement operations, $25 million of which went to just 9 sources. Additionally, we identified one source who was paid over $30 million during a 30-year period, some of it in cash payments of more than $400,000. We concluded the Intelligence Division’s management and oversight of its sources was not commensurate with the large amount of payments it made to them.”
BuzzFeed investigation into student informants
BuzzFeed has been running a revealing investigation into how police–including campus police at Ole Miss–in Oxford, Mississippi have been pressuring students and college-age residents into becoming informants. Here are links to the most recent articles:
How Mississippi Discovered The Drug War’s “Golden Egg” (April 20, 2015): A small-town narcotics unit has built a team of confidential informants by arresting low-level-offender college students and pressuring them to flip.
How Mississippi Cops Threaten College-Age Kids Into Becoming Informants (Oct. 1, 2015): A recording of two officers from Oxford, Mississippi’s Metro Narcotics unit sheds light on how the unit pressures college-age suspects into becoming informants.
From the most recent article:
“[E]ach year Metro Narcotics enlists an average of 30 informants, most of whom have little connection to the drug scene other than as low-level buyers. Around half of the 240 or so people arrested by Metro Narcotics in 2014 were first-time offenders, and the unit made three times as many arrests for marijuana as for any other drug. To get these young men and women to cooperate, the unit’s four agents often threaten them with prison sentences or a life-long drug record.”
The article also includes transcripts of a conversation between police and two young potential informants in which police threatened the young pregnant woman with an unrealistical 30-year sentence, and got her boyfriend–who had no drug charges or contacts–to agree to become a drug informant to ‘work off’ his girlfriend’s charge. The two young people initially agreed, but then decided not to become informants after they consulted with an attorney.
U.S. DOJ criticizes DEA informant program
The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. Department of Justice has just released this report, Audit of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Confidential Source Policies and Oversight of Higher-Risk Confidential Sources.
This is an important report for a number of reasons. The press and the public have had trouble getting basic information from the DEA about its informant policies and usage: this audit fills in some of those informational gaps. The audit identifies numerous troubling practices within the DEA and offers new insights into the kinds of risks that are routinely run by federal officials who rely on criminal informants. The audit also strengthens the case for a pending bill in Congress entitled “The Confidential Informant Accountability Act,” H.R. 2985, introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA). That bill would require the DEA, along with the FBI and other federal investigative agencies, to report to Congress the serious crimes committed by their informants, as well as their payments and rewards. As described in greater detail below, the OIG found that the DEA was seriously deficient in documenting and controlling the crimes committed by its informants.
Highlights of the Report:
1. The DEA resisted the audit. As the report put it, “the DEA has seriously impeded the OIG’s audit process, which has affected our ability to conduct a timely, full, and effective review of the DEA’s Confidential Source Program. The DEA made attempts to prohibit the OIG’s observation of confidential source file reviews and delayed, for months at a time, the provision of confidential source information and documentation.” The audit is therefore ongoing. This resistance to oversight is consistent with the general culture of secrecy surrounding informant use, in which law enforcement is often resistant to disclosing its practices, even to its own direct supervisors. See, for example, this post.
2. The DEA permits its informants to deal drugs and commit other crimes without adequate supervision or oversight. The U.S. DOJ has guidelines for its investigative agencies that require certain procedures before an informant can be authorized to commit a crime. The DOJ Guidelines, which are here, distinguish between Tier One and Tier Two Otherwise Illegal Activity (OIA). Tier One OIA includes very serious offenses and requires authorization from agency supervisors and a prosecutor.
The DEA does not follow these guidelines. For example, the DEA explicitly excludes “the purchase of drugs or other undercover activities that are routinely performed by DEA Agents and CSs [confidential sources] during the normal course of their duties” from the kinds of “sensitive activities” that require supervisory approval within the DEA. The only drug transactions for which the DEA rules require a prosecutor’s approval are those involving amounts under U.S. Sentencing Guidelines 2D1.1(c)(1), which are the highest amounts documented in the guidelines, and include 90 KG or more of heroin, 450 KG or more of cocaine; 25.2 KG or more of cocaine base (crack); 90 KG or more of PCP; and 45 KG or more of Methamphetamine. Amounts less than this do not require prosecutorial approval. The report concludes:
“We believe the DEA’s policies do not adequately address the concerns and risks involved in authorizing confidential sources to conduct and participate in OIA and do not correspond to the AG Guidelines’ requirements in place to mitigate these risks….DEA confidential sources could engage in illegal activity that has not been adequately considered, or become involved in additional illegal activities beyond those that have been considered with the mistaken belief that they are doing so with the authorization of the DEA. Further, an ill-considered or unclear decision to authorize a confidential source to engage in OIA may create significant difficulties in prosecuting the source or co-conspirators on charges related to the source’s activities.”
3. The DEA rarely reviews the relationships between its agents and their long-term informants (over six years), and when they do, the review is cursory. This is historically and famously problematic: the DOJ Guidelines were themselves a direct response to the FBI’s disastrous long-term relationships with its mafia informants.
4. The DEA pays some of its informants death and disability benefits when they are injured or killed in connection with their informant activities.