Families & Youth

Families sue DEA for informant handling policies

August 28, 2014 by Alexandra Natapoff

“The family of Jason Estrada recently filed a $50 million lawsuit against the agency, the second suit in recent months alleging problems with the DEA’s handling of informants. . . . Edward Quintana, 31, has been charged with killing Estrada. He also is charged with criminal sexual penetration of a child under 13. . . . The lawsuit and attached documents show Quintana became an informant for the agency in 2011 after Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputies served a search warrant on his home and seized nine ounces of heroin, $12,000 and three loaded semi-automatic handguns. . . . Another lawsuit filed last month said DEA agents paid a struggling addict in crack cocaine during an undercover investigation into a Las Vegas, New Mexico, drug operation.”

Air Force academy pressures cadets into snitching

April 1, 2014 by Alexandra Natapoff

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.

Death of a young Washington informant inspires new legislation

February 5, 2013 by Alexandra Natapoff

Jeremy McLean was a young informant who was threatened and eventually killed by a heroin trafficker. Jeremy’s story–and his parents’ lawsuit against the police– was featured in the widely-read 2012 New Yorker article on the risky use of young informants. The Daily News subsequently ran this in-depth four-part series detailing the specifics of how Jeremy came to be an informant after he developed an addiction to pain medication, the threats against his life, and the police’s inaction that contributed to his death: Death of an Informant, Part I.

In January, Washington State Senator Adam Kline introduced legislation, SB 5373, that would regulate the use of drug informants like Jeremy. The bill would ban the use of informants who are 16 years old and under, require police to tell informants about their obligations and potential rewards in writing, and establish new accountability mechanisms for keeping track of informant use. It’s an important bill, particularly the restriction on using juvenile informants which few states currently have.