Police and Confidential Informants

For the past forty years, the American criminal justice system has been at the forefront of a war on drugs. Law enforcement authorities have served as the front line in this battle, heading up a wide-ranging array of domestic interdiction operations. Budgetary data speak to the breadth and depth of this prolonged intervention. According to a recent Rand Corporation study, police have spent an estimated $600 billion on domestic interdiction operations since the early 1980s (Chalk 2011). In fiscal year 2015 alone, federal and state authorities budgeted nearly $10 billion for local, state, and federal drug enforcement operations; an additional $5 billion was requested to fund domestic and international interdiction efforts (Office of National Drug Control Policy 2015). Moreover, government and private funding entities allocate hundreds of millions of dollars for research, training, and technical assistance grants to agencies, universities, and nonprofit organizations.

Domestic drug enforcement takes many forms, from the rural patrol officer who happens on a small-scale mobile "shake-and-bake" methamphetamine lab during a routine traffic stop, to the city narcotics detective who initiates a low-level buy-bust operation that nets a few hits of crack cocaine on the street corner, to the local, state, and federal agents working in multiagency taskforces that coordinate large-scale sting operations that net thousands of kilo bricks of near-pure cocaine being transported by tractor-trailer. Regardless of the form, there is a high probability that the precursor or aftermath of each of these scenarios will involve law enforcement authorities exploiting access to known offenders and exerting pressure on them to gather inside information about active illicit drug markets. "Confidential informant" is the common label affixed to those individuals who provide intelligence on the inner workings of an illicit drug operation in exchange for leniency or remuneration. Given the heightened enforcement efforts and heavy legal penalties associated with drug crime, persons who sell drugs often find it in their best interests to conceal their activities from law enforcement agents and diversify operations so as to minimize their exposure to the threat of apprehension and escalating sanctions. Concomitantly, harsh formal responses have led to the development of a sophisticated and hierarchical structure to deal with the manufacture, transportation, and distribution of illicit drugs, with many players serving many different roles within a clandestine system that necessitates deliberate means of intelligence and infiltration. While police enlist the intelligence of confidential informants to advance their criminal investigation efforts into most every type of offending, it is within the context of narcotics enforcement that this practice most frequently comes to our attention.

PUSHES AND PULLS OF CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANT USAGE

The above-mentioned multilayered reality both pushes and pulls law enforcement authorities toward the use of confidential informants. The secretive, wide-ranging, and hierarchical nature of illicit criminal enterprises pushes law enforcement authorities to use confidential informants. In the case of the illegal drug market, all players — from street level dealers to cartel chieftains — methodically conceal their identities from law enforcement as a means of mitigating negative consequences. Narcotics investigators have come to rely on insiders, from witnesses to drug users to street hustlers, as a means of revealing the identities of the persons who manufacture, traffic, and distribute illegal drugs. Once the identities of drug dealers are known, police must discern the nature of the drug operation and catch the participants engaging in an illegal transaction. Here, again, police are pushed to rely on participants in the drug market (e.g., users, lower-level dealers, etc.) as a means of setting up and participating in the transaction under the watchful eye of fellow law enforcement authorities (Worrall 2001; Wisotsky 1986).

Not only are officers pushed toward the use of confidential informants due to the outsider status of police in criminal enterprises but they are also pulled toward it by the internal workings of modern police agencies and by their own self-interests. Today, police officers are routinely evaluated based on their success in disrupting criminal activity. Law enforcement agencies have grown increasingly accustomed to systematically counting arrests, showcasing significant disruptions of criminal enterprises via the media, and documenting changes in crime rates within their jurisdiction. This is especially true when it comes to drug crime, as the aforementioned massive budgetary commitments and high-profile nature of the problem ratchet up expectations to impact drug crime in a measurable and meaningful way. At the most mundane level, especially in the growing number of local police departments that have adopted a Compstat management system, the meticulous tracking of the number and location of calls for drug-related service and arrests has become an institutionalized practice. The officers account for their existence and present their work outputs in the form of weekly briefings, annual reports, and web platforms that afford near real-time access to crime statistics (Weisburd et al. 2004). This produces various forms of internal pressure within police agencies, which in turn leads to competition among officers and across units for the glory that goes along with changes in arrest numbers and high-profile drug busts (Dabney 2010). The use of confidential informants is a proven means through which to clear drug crimes. In fact, Roger Billingsley, Teresa Nemitz, and Philip Bean estimate that "about one third of all crimes cleared up by police involve the use of informers [broadly defined to include citizens who provide tips, paid informants, and apprehended criminals seeking to work off charges]" (2001, 5). Thinking more proactively, police agencies have come to appreciate that the threat of sanctions for drug crimes serves as a valuable tool to compel persons to provide actionable information on any unsolved crime. Investigators routinely pry information pertaining to open burglary, robbery, rape, or murder cases from offenders who are faced with the threat of heavy charges and sentences for drug offenses. It is on this basis that former director of the FBI William Webster is credited with stating: "The informant is the single most important tool in law enforcement" (cited in Bloom 2002, 158).

At a more bureaucratic level, Kraska (2001) observes that police agencies have grown increasingly specialized in their structures, instituting myriad...