Maintaining Relationships with Informants

The actual activities, strategies, and processes of how law enforcement officials work with and manage confidential informants is explicated in this chapter. Here the processes of working within (and around) bureaucratic requirements for establishing and maintaining a relationship with an informant is examined. So too are the many ways that relationships between individual officers and informants are structured and maintained, the costs, benefits, and dangers (personal and professional) of creating a “too close” relationship are outlined and the ways in which such relationships are authentic or manipulative presented. Management of the relationship with an informant, while keeping them motivated, honest and reliable are underscored through reports of relationships, both successful and not.

Study Methods

Chapter 2 presents the methods of the current study. Three fieldwork projects in two cities are explained, including one researcher’s embeddedness with a plain-clothes, street crime unit, one researcher’s 10 month inclusion with a narcotics investigation unit, and one author’s 18 months of participant observation with a major city’s homicide investigation unit. Additionally, in-depth interviews with 15 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities were conducted. These three sources of data are integrated and triangulate the data used for the analysis.

Benefits of Working with Informants

Chapter 7 explicitly identifies the benefits that are derived by both law enforcement in general and individual law enforcement officers. In addition to the obvious benefit of gaining information to facilitate the control/resolution of crime, so too are there benefits in the form of providing law enforcement agencies and agents with a deeper understanding of the communities in which they work and professional development and advancement opportunities. While using informants to gain evidence against offenders that can subsequently be removed from the community, so too do policing efforts benefit from learning the players, plays, strategies and lines of affiliation and loyalty within a community. And, on a personal professional level, those who display an affinity and acumen for recruiting, developing, and managing informants in an effective manner gain status, prestige, and very possibly promotion within their agencies.

The Game

Chapter 5 examines a different perspective on the use of informants, highlighting their use in narcotics investigations. With a focus on how different types of community members do and do not interact (and cooperate) with law enforcement officials the role of informants is brought central. By examining the beliefs and attitudes of policing officials, the belief that one can understand and fight for the “good people” of a community while striving to control and remove those who are a “scourge” on the community, the perceptions and activities of police who work with informants is described. Finally, this chapter also discusses the ways that community and law enforcement’s shared experiences and perspectives can influence the work of police and informants.

Working with Informants

Chapter four highlights the actual ways that law enforcement officers work with confidential informants. Here the processes by which informants are identified and recruited are discussed, including a stage model for conceptualizing the process. The means by which officials communicate with potential informants is addressed, especially how indentured informants are convinced to provide information so as to assist themselves in their own (or others’) legal entanglements. Also highlighted are the characteristics that law enforcement officers find desirable and challenging, including the role of gender, and how different characteristics of officers, informants, and situations coalesce to create information exchanges.

Pitfalls of Working with Informants

Chapter 8 contrasts the content of Chapter 7 with a focus on the pitfalls and potential problems involved in law enforcement officials working with confidential informants. The problems and pitfalls of working with confidential informants are classified as personal, professional, and individualized issues. Personal pitfalls include the intrusion of work and informant relationships on private/personal time and allowing one’s relationship with some informants to cross the line into a “personal” relationship. Professionally law enforcement officials can face problems with informants in the form of being misled by unreliable informants and informants who attempt to skirt their “responsibilities” or deals with police. And, as the individual issue pointed to most frequently by policing officials as a danger of working with an informant is “being burned,” and having informants provide explicitly false information and/or information that sets an officer up for attack, failure or embarrassment.

Summary and Implications

The concluding chapter summarizes the key take away messages emanating from the ethnographic work that underlies the book. A series of theoretical considerations are detailed, including an effort to establish a broader context associated with the book’s 4-part typology of the police-citizen information exchange, the observation that informant work is inherently complex, and that more theoretical development is needed. A host of policy considerations are forwarded, including calls for more structure and protocol surrounding informant use and a need for police to plan ahead on the role that the police-citizen information exchange will play in the future.

Types of Informants

This chapter introduces a typology of confidential informants. Through assessing the motivation/reason that informants become such and whether law enforcement adopts a passive or active role in soliciting information from such person we construct a four category typology of confidential informants. By examining whether informants are coerced or volunteers and whether police simply receive information or actively work on and with individuals to attain desired information the varieties of cooperating sources, civic-minded sources, indentured informants and entrepreneurs are defined and discussed. How each main variety of informant interacts with law enforcement and the structure of such relationships is prioritized.

Police and Confidential Informants

This chapter examines the state of knowledge regarding law enforcement and confidential informants. The bulk of the previous literature has taken either a very practical, hands-on, how-to approach written by practitioners or a very legalistic perspective focusing on the ways that informant use fits (or does not fit) within legal structures. Additionally, social science literature on the topic is available, but is all at least 2 or 3 decades old. This literature approaches informants as a part of the structure of police agencies and investigations and primarily emphasizes the utility of informants for investigations. What is largely missing from the literature is the perspective of informants and the officers with whom they work, foci which the current book emphasizes.