Snitching

Criminal Informant Law, Policy, and Research

Police

Intercept publishes FBI informant manual

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The Intercept has published the FBI’s 2015 Confidential Human Source Policy Guide. It includes policies on recruitment, payments, and international informants: The FBI Gives Itself A Lot of Rope to Pull In Informants.  From the article:

“The classified guidelines reveal:
  • Before approaching a potential informant, agents are encouraged to build a file on that person, using information obtained during an FBI assessment, including derogatory information and information gleaned from other informants. The FBI claims that it seeks derogatory information in order not to be blindsided by its informants’ vulnerabilities, but such material may also be useful in coercing cooperation from otherwise unwilling recruits.
  • FBI agents may use undercover identities to recruit informants, including online. These approaches are not limited by a rule stipulating that agents and informants are allowed no more than five meetings with a target before their activity is subject to supervisory approval as an undercover operation.
  • With permission from supervisors, FBI agents may recruit minors as informants. They may also, with permission from the U.S. Department of Justice, recruit clergy, lawyers, and journalists.
  • Informants may operate in other countries for the FBI, and the FBI guidelines do not require notification to be given to the host countries.”

10th anniversary of Kathryn Johnston’s informant-related death

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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.

Informant contradicts Tampa police account of SWAT killing

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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.

Denver Post examines costs and benefits of informant use

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The Denver Post ran this three-part in depth series on informant use: How police reliance on confidential informants in Colorado carries risk, Some want harsher laws for confidential informants in Colorado, and Colorado gang slaying by ATF informant shows perils of informant use.

The series documents a large number of convictions obtained through informant use, including important evidence against violent gangs.  It also reveals wrongful convictions, an ACLU lawsuit, tens of thousands of dollars paid to informants, and the continuing violent crimes committed by some informants while they were working for the federal government.