ABC News ran this story about a mother who was pulled over for traffic violations and then pressured into becoming a drug informant to avoid arrest. Story here: Cops Use Traffic Tix to Force Woman into Drug Buys, Lawyer Claims. This is the same scenario reported in Attica, New York, where another young woman was pressured into becoming a drug informant when she was stopped for failing to pay traffic tickets. See this post: Recruiting new informants. Such stories remind us that police have discretion to use any opportunity–even a speeding ticket–to recruit new informants, even when the offense is minor or has nothing to do with the crimes the police want to investigate.
Police
FP: Does the FBI Have an Informant Problem?
Foreign Policy just published this article on the troubling use of informants in domestic counter-terrorism: Does the FBI Have an Informant Problem? The piece analyzes the large challenges of using unregulated criminal informants to do law enforcement work, and discusses a series of recent examples. From the article:
Professional informants are paid by law enforcement to infiltrate criminal or extremist circles, sometimes on a full-time basis. Yet they’re not considered employees of the government and are not subject to the same rules. From warrantless searches to sex with targets to constructing terrorist plots out of thin air, the informant problem is not new, but this powerful investigative tool is under pressure like never before after being exposed to the harsh light of day in a series of recent terrorism trials. Growing media scrutiny and a pending civil lawsuit in California are aggressively challenging whether the benefits of aggressive informant tactics outweigh the risk to civil liberties and are raising troubling questions about the legitimacy of terrorism investigations
More on young informants
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.
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.
NYT Magazine on the complexity of snitching
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.