The New Yorker article is generating new awareness and a lot of great discussion about young informants and the use of criminal informants more generally. TalkLeft discusses the overall challenges of informant use here: Informants as Pawns in the War on Drugs. NPR’s Talk of the Nation did a special segment on the topic here: Use of Confidential Informants Mostly Unregulated.
Families & Youth
New Yorker story on young informants
The New Yorker has just published an important story on the use of young vulnerable informants. It discusses numerous cases in which young people have lost their lives trying to work off their own offenses, and reveals how common the practice is and how little protection the law and police typically provide. Synopsis here: The Throwaways: Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants. But the work is high-risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal.
An alternative to snitching for juvenile drug offenders?
Using juvenile offenders as informants can be the opposite of rehabilitation: it keeps young people in contact with criminal networks and can exacerbate drug use and other dangerous behaviors. See this post on a Miami juvenile informant. But a new “restorative justice” approach in Texas offers a different model, in which juveniles charged with serious drug offenses are offered a chance at rehabilitation and skills training. Here’s the NYTimes article: New Home for Juveniles Recruited to the Drug Trade. Almost no states regulate the law enforcement policy of turning young people into informants (see Dennis, Juvenile Snitches); the Texas experiment reminds us that the juvenile system is first and foremost supposed to be rehabilitative.
Law review article on Rachel’s Law
The Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice has published this note, Toward Efficiency and Equity in Law Enforcement: “Rachel’s Law” and the Protection of Drug Informants. It focuses on an important provision in Rachel’s Law that was eliminated, that would have required police to provide potential informants with counsel. Here’s the abstract:
Following the murder of Rachel Morningstar Hoffman–a 23-year old college graduate–Florida passed “Rachel’s Law,” which established new guidelines for the police when dealing with confidential informants. Immediately prior to its enactment, lawmakers stripped Rachel’s Law of key provisions. These provisions required police to provide a potential informant with an attorney before agreeing to any deal. Opponents of these provisions argue that they hamstring law enforcement agencies in their efforts to prosecute drug crimes. Rather than serving as an obstacle to effective law enforcement, the attorney provision in the original version of Rachel’s Law enables efficient prosecution of crimes and protects minor drug offenders who may be unsuited for potentially dangerous undercover informant work. This Note recommends that the attorney provision be restored to Rachel’s Law, and encourages other states to enact similar statutes.
Impact of “Rachel’s Law” on informant use
The Tallahassee Democrat has published this article about the effects of Rachel’s Law on informant use in Florida, four years after the death of Rachel Hoffman: Four years later, Hoffman’s death still impacts CI use. The article concludes that the Tallahassee police department made some significant changes.
For six months immediately following Hoffman’s death, the department suspended the use of all CIs. For a long time, no one wanted to work narcotics cases, which often rely on informants, the chief said.
“We had to be confident in our investigators that they were ready,” Chief Jones said.
An audit of department confidential-informant files conducted about six months after Hoffman was killed found lax record keeping and noted areas of improvement. Personnel were moved, the vice unit was made a part the Criminal Investigations Division of a new Special Investigation Section and supervision was stepped up.
Today, TPD’s rules governing the handling of confidential informants mirror that of Rachel’s Law, which was spearheaded by Hoffman’s parents and provides some safeguards for vulnerable informants.
“I think we’ve got a very good policy now,” Jones said. “We have elevated ourselves and are back in the lead and set the tone for the state.”
Tallahassee is reminiscent of Los Angeles in the 1990s. After a massive grand jury investigation concluded that the jail was rampant with unreliable informants and that police and prosecutors were relying on them, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office instituted significant changes. Today, it has some of the most rigorous regulations for the tracking and use of jailhouse informants in the country: Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office Legal Policies Manual.