Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Dynamics of Snitching

Informant contradicts Tampa police account of SWAT killing

by

The Tampa Bay Times reports that a criminal informant has come forward to dispute the police’s account of a SWAT team killing.  In Confidential informer blows whistle in fatal Tampa SWAT raid, the Times describes the informant Ronnie Coogle as a 50-year-old addict and long-time offender who often worked as a police informant.  Coogle says that police misrepresented the information he gave them, as that as a result police unnecessarily killed “Jason Westcott, a young man with no criminal convictions whom a SWAT team killed during a drug raid that found just $2 worth of marijuana.”  As the Times describes it, it’s impossible to know what the truth really is, both because of Coogle’s own admitted record of lying to police, and the police’s failure to monitor or keep records about Coogle and the case:

“Coogle is nobody’s idea of a righteous whistle-blower. The only constant in his story is his own dishonesty; even when he confesses to lying you don’t know if he’s telling the truth.  Much of what he says can be neither proved nor disproved, in large part because of the Police Department’s minimal supervision of his work. But Coogle’s allegations against the cops who paid him, and even his own admissions of double-dealing, aren’t necessarily what’s most disturbing about his account.  Most unsettling of all might be what nobody disputes — that police officers were willing to trust somebody like him in the first place.”

Another informant who turned on his handlers in this way was Alex White, the Atlanta informant who blew the lid off the police killing of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston and triggered a federal investigation into Atlanta police practices.  See the New York Times Magazine feature here.

Air Force academy pressures cadets into snitching

by

The Colorado Springs Gazette ran this extensive story about “a secretive Air Force program [that] recruits academy students to inform on fellow cadets and disavows them afterward.” Story here: Honor and Deception, and also Fox News story here. The program–which pressures cadets, especially those of color, into violating Academy rules under pressure of expulsion–appears to exhibit the classic corrosive costs of informant culture. From the Gazette report:

For one former academy student, becoming a covert government operative meant not only betraying the values he vowed to uphold, it meant being thrown out of the academy as punishment for doing the things the Air Force secretly told him to do….Eric Thomas, 24, was a confidential informant for the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI — a law enforcement branch of the Air Force. OSI ordered Thomas to infiltrate academy cliques, wearing recorders, setting up drug buys, tailing suspected rapists and feeding information back to OSI. In pursuit of cases, he was regularly directed by agents to break academy rules….Through it all, he thought OSI would have his back. But when an operation went wrong, he said, his handlers cut communication and disavowed knowledge of his actions, and watched as he was kicked out of the academy….The Air Force’s top commander and key members of the academy’s civilian oversight board claim they have no knowledge of the OSI program. The Gazette confirmed the program, which has not been reported in the media through interviews with multiple informants, phone and text records, former OSI agents, court filings and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The records show OSI uses FBI-style tactics to create informants. Agents interrogate cadets for hours without offering access to a lawyer, threaten them with prosecution, then coerce them into helping OSI in exchange for promises of leniency they don’t always keep. OSI then uses informants to infiltrate insular cadet groups, sometimes encouraging them to break rules to do so. When finished with informants, OSI takes steps to hide their existence, directing cadets to delete emails and messages, misleading Air Force commanders and Congress, and withholding documents they are required to release under the Freedom of Information Act. The program also appears to rely disproportionately on minority cadets like Thomas.

Snitching among slaves

by

Professor Andrea Dennis has posted this exploration of the role of Black informants during slavery: A Snitch in Time: An Historical Sketch of Black Informing During Slavery. It’s her second piece on informants–the first one addressed juvenile snitching in the war on drugs. Here’s the abstract:

This article sketches the socio-legal creation, use, and regulation of informants in the Black community during slavery and the Black community’s response at that time. Despite potentially creating benefits such as crime control and sentence reduction, some Blacks today are convinced that cooperation with government investigations and prosecutions should be avoided. One factor contributing to this perspective is America’s reliance on Black informants to police and socially control Blacks during slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Wars on Drugs, Crime and Gangs. Notwithstanding this historical justification for non-cooperation, only a few informant law and policy scholars have examined closely the Black community’s relationship with informing. Furthermore, even among this small group of works, noticeably absent are historical explorations of Black America’s experience with informing during slavery. Drawn using a variety of primary and secondary historical and legal sources, this article develops a snapshot of the past revealing many similarities between the Black experience with informing both while enslaved and in contemporary times. Consideration of these resemblances during present debate on the topic may help to facilitate nuanced conversation as to whether and how the modern Black community and government should approach using informants in current times.

This is an important piece of history. As Dennis points out, there has been an underappreciated trajectory from slave informants to the FBI snitches planted in civil rights organizations, to the “Stop Snitching” movement in urban neighborhoods. For a helpful articulation of the relationship between that trajectory and hip hop’s glorification of “stop snitching,” see Professor Mark Lamont Hill’s piece “A Breakdown of the Stop Snitching Movement.”

NYT Magazine on the complexity of snitching

by

Some of you may remember Alex White, the Atlanta informant who revealed the police corruption that killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. This Sunday’s NYT Magazine details the often unbelievable twists and turns of that saga, from Johnston’s shooting to White’s career as a snitch for multiple local and federal agencies, to the Congressional hearing and prosecutions that ensured. A great window into the police/informant world: A Snitch’s Dilemma.

In the news: Seattle ATF informant with history of crime against women

by

A story by the Seattle Times about an ATF informant with a disturbing history of violence against women: Violent criminal on federal payroll as informant. The story begins like this:

Despite a history of abusing women and violent behavior in prison, Joshua Allan Jackson managed to become a federal informant, trigger a citywide Seattle police alert and hold a 18-year-old woman as his sexual prisoner.