Harris says he saw the other men start stabbing the victims in an alleged robbery that spiraled out of control. The use of confidential informants became a central issue in one of the most heinous crimes in Denver history, after an informant helped police arrest three men in the stabbing deaths of five people.ĭemarea Harris was working as an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives when he and three friends walked into Fero’s Bar and Grill in October 2012. Without that, there are a lot of things that will go undetected until it’s too late.” Reliability questioned “They know people that have access that we will likely never have. “The bottom line is they have access that we do not,” Carter said. With the ability to move in and out of the criminal world, informants - who often are criminals working for cash or deals from authorities - provide investigators with information they couldn’t obtain otherwise, police say. Informants provide the backbone for hundreds of drug investigations each year. Police and prosecutors say the problems that come with reliance on informants are outweighed by the benefits. “Because the use of informants is so unregulated, the public almost never learns about it until something goes terribly wrong,” said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Discipline for officers who mishandle cases involving informants is rare. Informants who give bad information may be removed from service, but they’re unlikely to face stiffer penalties unless they commit a crime while working for police. Police often find nothing when executing a warrant, even in cases in which the information was reliable and the suspect may have been committing a crime, he said. Steven Carter said those cases are not examples of unreliable informants, but rather a demonstration of the many levels of an investigation. In the “interest of justice,” prosecutors later dismissed the case.ĭenver police Capt. But when police searched the home, they found bath salts, not the drug, according to a search warrant. Charges were later dropped.Ī man was arrested in April 2014 after an informant, whom detectives considered reliable, told police he was selling large amounts of meth from his west Denver home. But police didn’t find the drug in his southwest Denver home or car. In another case, Denver police arrested a man in August after a first-time informant said he was selling $6,800 worth of cocaine every week. In an October case, detectives wrote that a first-time informant “is familiar with the sale and packaging of heroin as the informant has been around, used and purchased heroin in the past.” The Post examined all 2014 search warrants in Denver in which use of confidential informants was disclosed. Denver police say 90 percent of their informants have some kind of criminal record. The rest were first-time informants, whose fitness for assignments is typically established by their criminal activity or drug use and their access to other criminals. Police departments are left to their own discretion, and while many have comprehensive policies, some have none at all.Ī Denver Post review of Denver Police Department data on confidential informants found that only about 40 percent of those used in fiscal 2014 had proven themselves reliable in previous cases. In Colorado, there is no law regulating whom investigators recruit to work as informants, how informants are rewarded, how the information informants provide is handled or how officers and informants are held accountable when things go wrong. “As time goes on, I keep expecting to feel better about what happened to me,” she said recently in an e-mail, “but I don’t seem to let go.” But the informant was not charged for lying to police, and the detectives faced no sanctions for failing to verify her information. Gonzales, who was once the informant’s probation officer, saw her charges dropped, as did other defendants. Information from that informant and another created the basis of 40 drug cases that later proved to be little more than lies. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |