The Tallahassee Democrat printed an article Sunday (
read Here) with good information on police use of informants, if not a bit naive. Obviously Police need informants for vital issues. Such as people selling information of national security concern, counterfeiting or any other number of issues that can result in serious harm. In most instances it would seem that a trained experienced undercover agent that knew what they were getting themselves into would be the obvious choice. I will grant you that their are probably occasions when it is necessary to take what you can get. However the problem with using any informant in the drug wars is to risk more harm than the drugs themselves cause. Rachel Hoffmans life is the perfect example.
Even more disturbing is how the Tallahassee Police Department has consistently been attempting to paint the victim as being at fault. The problem is we are all victims of the drug wars as we
pointed out here. Whether You
USE DRUGS OR NOT!
From the Sunday Tallahassee Democrat and some observations:
There was nothing uncommon about Tallahassee police sending Rachel Hoffman to Forestmeadows Park to buy illegal drugs and a gun from two suspected dealers.
Considering Ms. Hoffman was a 23 year old, recent college graduate, sentenced to drug court who by all newspaper accounts would appear to be on the naive side or at the very least be experiencing significant problems this scares me.But the operation didn't go as planned. Hoffman, an FSU graduate facing several drug charges, agreed with the dealers to meet at nearby Royalty Plant Nursery instead. Police say they begged Hoffman not to go, but she hung up on them. Thirty-six hours later her body was found, dumped off a dirt road in Taylor County woods.
This is yet another example TPD trying to place the blame on Hoffman. If you can not control your informant, then you need another informant. TPD was in charge, TPD must take responsibility.
"It's the war on drugs gone crazy," said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore cop and now assistant law professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
This girl shouldn't be dead," Moskos said. "She shouldn't have been doing this. This is police work. She's not a cop. To hold her responsible for a buy-and-bust gone wrong is crazy."
Exactly.
But pressure to deliver drug arrests has produced a criminal-informant culture that is cloaked in secrecy and fraught with pitfalls, said Alexandra Natapoff, a Loyola Law School professor and national expert on the subject. (which is exactly what we point out in our post linked to above)
"Informants are often addicted, young, frightened, vulnerable people who are looking at the ruin of their life in the threat of prosecution, and often they will do anything," said Natapoff, who testified on the issue before Congress last year. "Informants are not being treated as helpers of law enforcement but as tools of law enforcement that can be expendable."
Read that as vulnerable people being used and abused. Are their snitches that are lower than slime shit and deserve whatever happens to them? Of course. Ms. Hoffman was not one of them.
"We don't know how many college students the Tallahassee Police Department or anyone else have turned into informants under threat of drug prosecution," she said. "The truth is we do not know the shape of this very public policy issue."
Or any other threat of prosecution. So the question becomes how many people are law enforcement agencies coercing into"free" police work and how many of your neighbors are watching YOU! Paranoid you might say, as the article points out, we do not know do we?
"State drug cases represent more than 1.5 million arrests each year, and most typically involve informants."
As we pointed out in our post, if one state is producing 1.5 million yearly drug related arrests shouldn't we be stepping back and asking ourselves, to what end? If they are arresting 1.5 million yearly, what is the number they are not arresting? Common sense dictates that current policy regarding drug use is not working. That is the National Question! How come we are not debating that? Primarily, as we point out in the above post there are to many people on both sides of the law that are profiting from the current policy. It's not about drug use! It's about money!
"Secrecy surrounding informants, critics say, can lead to wrongful convictions, more crime and deaths such as Hoffman's."
Anytime the government operates in secrecy it is an issue of concern and our fore fathers warned us against it. Add to the "Drug Wars" the Patriot act, FISA, Telecommunications monitoring and other clandestine government acts and the little violation of rights here and little violation of rights there and it equals one DAMN BIG BROTHER!
"Your everyday drug dealer is not going to kill someone when they find out they are being snitched on," he said. "Unfortunately this case didn't go right." Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Michael Sanders said.
HELLO! When this story first broke we said it stinks. And we have yet to see anything yet that removes that stink.
Natapoff said unregulated use of confidential sources costs more than lives. The public-safety goals of the criminal-justice system itself are at risk, she said:
"We put a great deal of pressure on law enforcement when we ask for drug enforcement.... What we've done is given them an almost totally unregulated tool to produce drug busts. What do you think they are going to do? This is the beginning of a national debate, not the end of it."
And the debate should not be about the use of informants. It should be about a national tendency to place GREED, emotion over fact, and oppression over the founding principles of this nation. If that occurs, then Rachel Morningstar Hoffman's death will have had meaning.Add to Technorati Favorites
Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.
