Here is a story from Raleigh, North Carolina about corruption involving a Raleigh police officer and a confidential informant. While the article lacks detail and the investigation is still ongoing, there are a few things we can be fairly sure were wrong.

1. Uniform officers do not meet confidential informants especially in uniform patrol vehicles and while in uniform. There is a clue in the word ‘confidential’. How can we possibly protect the life of an informant if we are not meeting them in a covert way?

2. Why was any officer allowed to meet with a confidential informant alone? The departments procedures should not permit. If they do and someone breeches the rule a disciplinary enquire should begin automatically. Meeting informants involves significant risk. Meeting two up manages many risks.

3. Where was the supervisor? Did they know what the officer was doing? If not, why not? and if they did they hold responsibility for what ahs occurred.

4. Was the informant registered? Where was the corporate oversight of what was happening? This is where we start to climb the food chain and ask questions of those with a corporate responsibility for the management of the agency.

What we have here is an officer whose career is potentially irreparably damaged, an agency whose reputation is further damaged, particularly relating to informant management and the loss of public confidence. And unfortunately for Chief Patterson she is left in a position where she is exposed. All of this is avoidable.

As we have said before managing informants involves significant risk. Agencies must manage those risks. There are steps that need to be taken. It is not always as simple as it may seem. If you think that closing just one door will manage the risks, it won’t.

It takes us one week to look at your agency and one week for us to write up what we see. You will have a complete expert and independent audit of your confidential informant management and your intelligence systems. What you do with that information is up to you. And as with any agency that we discuss here there is no fee for an audit.

From a personal perspective after over forty years of law enforcement experience I find these things very frustrating. You know the feeling when you watch a teenage driver trying to take a bend at 60 when all the signs say 30 and then watching emergency services trying to unwrap him from a tree. You feel twice as bad that you can’t get the chance to say ‘I told you so.’

Fix your informant systems or hit the proverbial tree.