Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Natapoff: Snitching reforms require 'changing the culture of secrecy and deregulation' among law enforcement

Reacting to the Grits post titled "Dallas home invader snitches, walks free, then fingers competitors while starting up new crew," Loyola (CA) law professor Sasha Natapoff wrote on her Snitching Blog:
By now the story of criminal informants who continue to commit crimes while working for the government is depressingly familiar news; see, for example, these posts: Killer FBI Informant, and House of Death informant and Committing Crime While Working for the Government. Ongoing crime is an inherent feature of the snitching phenomenon, at least in the U.S. (some countries formally restrict their governments' authority to tolerate informant crime, but the U.S. is not yet one of them.) Accordingly, we need to figure out whether snitching is worth it. Do we solve more crimes than we permit with these deals? When criminal informants re-offend, can we tell the victims that their suffering produced a greater good? In Dallas, the prosecutor said that Autrey "'cooperated and helped get indictments on cases that involved hundreds of thousands of dollars' in mortgage fraud, student loan fraud and other white-collar crimes. He also said that Autrey continued to work with authorities on violent crimes, including some home invasion robberies committed by other people." Is that worth the dozens of robberies that Autrey continued to commit, including one in which robbers shot at a homeowner, and another in which they tied up a 15-year-old girl? We can't have a full public debate about these questions because the government doesn't produce the data--we don't know how many crimes informants commit and solve. This is a central reason why I argue that data collection and transparency reforms are so fundamental. As I wrote in the book's introduction:
"The most important [snitching reform] is the most difficult: changing the culture of secrecy and deregulation that permits informants and officials alike to bend rules, evade accountability, and operate in secret. It is this culture that fosters snitching's worst dangers: wrongful convictions, unchecked criminal behavior, official corruption, public deception, and the weakened legitimacy of the criminal process in the eyes of its constituents. It is also the feature that prevents us from addressing the ultimate public policy questions with clarity. The system currently handles the problem by asking us to accept on faith that unregulated snitching is worth its risks, without either demonstrating its full benefits or revealing its true costs. For a public policy of this far-reaching importance, such faith is not enough."
And that, my friends, shows why Natapoff's book Snitching just received the 2010 ABA Silver Gavel Award Honorable Mention for Books. Good stuff, and excellent advice for Dallas' new police chief.

RELATED: In another post, Natapoff elaborates on a "large-scale informant crime spree" from 1998 mentioned in Grits' comments.

1 comment:

R. Shackleford said...

Pfft. Snitches are the lowest form of life. Leo's abuse and manipulate the 'information' they supposedly acquire from these traitorous scum so often, it ought not to be allowed. A culture wherein snitching is a major part of police investigation procedure is a sorry ass culture indeed, a culture that's in deep trouble. Nobody ought to get a reward for peaching on their friends/family. In the words of some tough youngsters I once volunteered with in an inner city, "Snitches get stitches".