I try not to judge. People are fallible. We all do stupid things. Sometimes we do wrong things. People sometimes have serious lapses in judgement and once we get away with something, we think we can get away with it again. And then we are well and truly down the wrong road. Here is a story from New Albany, Indiana about a police officer that went well and truly down the wrong road with a confidential informant. In truth until I read the story I had no idea where New Albany was. I had to look it up on a map. But the reality is that its location is unimportant. This type of think could have happened in many police departments. The case is far from unique. No doubt everyone is seeking to cast all the blame on the officer. Time would be better spent looking at how this behavior occurred and how it continued for two years. When you study cases like this there is a familiar pattern. We will start with a few pointers.
Managing confidential informants involves significant risk including corruption, wrongful convictions and the risk to life of officer and/or informant.
Not every officer has the aptitude to do it safely. There is a myth that continues to be perpetuated that every officer should have informants while at the same time we all know officers who we would trust to take our dog for a walk.
If there is the opportunity for cops to do something stupid, sooner or later, someone will take that opportunity.
If we are going to find out exactly what went wrong in a case like this a full audit is advised. Undoubtedly there will be others who knew about this or suspected it and turned a blind eye. Potential some including supervisors will try to cover their tracks. And while it would be nice to know who knew what sometimes the most effective thing to do is stop the clock and begin again.
There are three things you will find need addressed:
The agency will need comprehensive procedures for the management of informants. Not five or six pages but detailed instructions as to how every informant must be managed.
The agency will need to train every officer it wants to manage informants. This is where it gets difficult. The Chief has to decide who they will allow to manage informants. Cost will dictate not every officer can be trained. Better to train a select few to do it well. A basic training course is going to be a minimum of 40 hours.
Comprehensive records must be kept of every contact with the informant. This requires purpose built computerised software for informant management. ALTIA have an off-the- shelf solution that has a module specifically for confidential informant management. It has everything you need (and at a price you can afford)
These are simple solutions but sometimes it is difficult to know where or how to start. We are the specialists We can identify and fix your problems before you end up with one of your officers in A BAD PLACE. We will make sure you have measures in place to mitigate the risks and we can train your officers to make sure they mange informants more safely and more productively.
If you want to know what you need to do (and a lot more about informant management have a read of our book Human Sources: Managing Confidential Informants.
If you want the best confidential informant training available reach out to discuss our courses. These can be put on exclusively for your agency or you can defray some of the cost by hosting it and inviting neighboring agencies. Email: info@hsmtraining.com
So if you are sitting in New Albany Police Department reach out to us and we will chat about what we can do to help you. One horse may have bolted but you still need to fix that stable door.
