Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

The Throwaways

Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants. But the work is high-risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal.

by Sarah Stillman
September 3, 2012 [issue of]

ABSTRACT: A REPORTER AT LARGE about Rachel Hoffman and the unsupervised informant system. On the evening of May 7, 2008, a twenty-three-year-old recent Florida State graduate named Rachel Hoffman got into her Volvo sedan and headed north to a public park in Tallahassee, Florida. On the passenger seat beside her was a handbag that contained thirteen thousand dollars in marked bills. She was not a trained narcotics operative. Perhaps what put her at ease was the knowledge that nineteen law-enforcement agents were tracking her every move, and that a Drug Enforcement Administration surveillance plane was circling overhead. Three weeks earlier, police officers had arrived at the door of her apartment after someone complained about the smell of marijuana. The cops seized slightly more than five ounces of pot and several Ecstasy and Valium pills. Hoffman could face serious prison time for felony charges. The officer in charge, Ryan Pender, told her that she might be able to help herself if she provided “substantial assistance” to the city’s narcotics team. She believed that any charges against her could be reduced, or even dropped. The operation did not go as planned. By the end of the hour, police lost track of her and her car. By the evening of her disappearance, Rachel Morningstar Hoffman had been working for the Tallahassee Police Department for almost three weeks. In bureaucratic terms, she was Confidential Informant No. 1129. In legal parlance, she was a “coöperator,” one of thousands of people who, each year, help the police build cases against others, often for the promise of leniency in the U.S. criminal-justice system. Informants are the foot soldiers in the government’s war on drugs. By some estimates, up to eighty per cent of all drug cases in America involve them, often in active roles like Hoffman’s. For police departments facing budget woes, untrained C.I.s are an inexpensive way of outsourcing the work of undercover officers. Unlike wiretaps and other highly regulated investigative techniques, informants can be deployed without a warrant. Often, their efforts involve no paperwork and no institutional oversight, let alone lawyers, judges, or public scrutiny. Every day, offenders are sent out to perform high-risk police operations with few legal protections. Some are juveniles, sometimes as young as fourteen or fifteen. Many have been given false assurances by the police, used with striking disregard for their safety, and treated as disposable pawns of the criminal-justice system. The recruitment of young informants often involves risks that are incommensurate with the charges that they are facing. The costs of coöperating can be high. Mentions LeBron Gaither and Daniel Taylor. Describes Rachel’s recruitment. A wire was found in Rachel Hoffman’s purse and she was shot five times in the chest and head with the gun the police had sent her to buy. After Rachel’s murder, her parents, Irv Hoffman, a mental-health counselor, and Margie Weiss, a registered nurse and massage therapist, joined together in order to reform the way young amateurs are used in the war on drugs. In the mid nineteen-eighties, Congress enacted federal sentencing guidelines that imposed harsh mandatory minimums for drug offenses, even petty ones. The results were striking. Over the course that decade, the U.S. prison population doubled. The use of drug informants surged. Hoffman was, in this respect, a typical conscript in America’s numbers-driven war on drugs. But Hoffman was in some ways not a typical C.I. Generally, it is young people from lower-income communities—often black and Latino—who are under pressure to be informants. It’s in their neighborhoods, too, that a serious backlash against the practice has occurred. Mentions Shelly Hilliard. In the case of Rachel Hoffman, her parents were concerned that authorities weren’t telling them the full story behind their daughter’s disappearance, and, initially, the department seemed to blame Hoffman for the circumstances of her murder. Mentions Police Chief Dennis Jones and Jeremy McLean. Mitchell McLean, of Vancouver, Washington, has come to see the death of his son, Jeremy, as the result of an equally cynical and utilitarian calculation. “The cops, they get federal funding by the number of arrests they make—to get the money, you need the numbers,” he said, citing asset-forfeiture laws that allow police departments to keep a hefty portion of cash and other resources seized during drug busts. “It’s a commercial enterprise,” he went on, citing a view shared by many legal scholars and policy critics. “That’s how they pay for their vans, for their prosecutors: they get money from the war on drugs.” Now, he said, the threshold for putting an informant’s life at risk is dramatically lower, and small cases to rack up arrest rates are the order of the day. This argument is at the heart of the lawsuit that Jeremy’s parents decided to file last December. They allege that the regional drug task force and the agents in charge of their son’s case showed “deliberate indifference” to an “obvious danger.” Mentions Lance Block. In August, a grand jury charged with reviewing the facts of the Hoffman case not only indicted the two murder suspects, Andrea Green and Deneilo Bradshaw, but also issued an unusually scathing condemnation of the police department’s conduct. After this, the police department began to acknowledge that it had made mistakes. An internal-affairs investigation released after the grand-jury statement revealed that police officers had committed at least twenty-one violations of nine separate policies in Hoffman’s case. On May 7, 2009, the anniversary of Hoffman’s murder, Governor Charlie Crist signed Rachel’s Law, which Irv Hoffman and Margie Weiss helped conceive, and it became the first comprehensive legislation of its kind in the nation. Last year, Margie and Irv won another major victory: a $2.6 million settlement from the city of Tallahassee in a wrongful-death lawsuit—along with a formal apology. Now they hope to take their campaign beyond Florida and broaden their push for regulations of the kind that might have saved their daughter.

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Related

Audio: Sarah Stillman and Evan Ratliff on the use and abuse of confidential informants.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/08/out-loud-sarah-stillman.html

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© 2012 Condé Nast

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_stillman [for subscribers, complete article viewable at http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2012-09-03#folio=038 ]

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