Tipsters big part of LR police

$600,000 paid to informants

— Just hours after Charles Gaskins was shot to death on his porch in southwest Little Rock by two masked men, detective Tommy Hudson had a tip from a confidential informant who knew the gunmen’s names and the license plate number on the vehicle they were traveling in.

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When the men switched vehicles, the informant passed the change on to police, and, a short time later, officers stopped the car on Rodney Parham Road. Police arrested both men, one of whom provided a taped statement implicating them in the slaying.

The July 31 shooting is just one case in which informants have provided information for Little Rock police in recent years.

The Little Rock Police Department has nearly 2,000 untrained confidential informants who participate in undercover operations and provide information for cases, including homicides,robberies and drug crimes.

The department has made 5,092 payments to more than 200 of those informants, totaling more than $600,000, between Jan. 1, 2007, and July 24 of this year - the most recent data available - for participating in operations involving drug buys, the movement of drugs around the city and in some cases purchasing weapons from convicted felons, according to an analysis of records obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette through the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

Capt. Dustin Robertson, the commander over the narcotics, vice and intelligence units, said informants are used for a variety of purposes, sometimes depending on their criminal involvement before turning to informing.

“If it’s a hand-to-hand street corner deal and we have an informant that can do that, we’ll utilize them for that. If it’s a bigger scale, someone’s moving pounds, we can use them for that,” Robertson said.

‘BIGGER FISH’

A shift from targeting street-level dealers to focusing on trafficking has led to more involvement from the FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency in recent years, said Assistant Chief of Police Hayward Finks, who oversees the Investigative and Support Services Bureau.

In addition to more manpower and more resources, federal involvement also pushes the burden of paying informants on to those agencies.

After a peak of more than $156,000 in payments to informants in 2008, the Police Department is on pace to spend less than half of that by the end of this year, records show.

“Historically, we’ve dealt with a lot of lower-scale drug houses in our city that sell lesser amounts of crack cocaine or different narcotics, and we have tried to focus more [in recent years] on the larger-scale suppliers,” Finks said. “When you do that, it does lead us more to cooperating with the federal level ... and when we do that, there is federal money available.”

Robertson said many informants who sign up to work with the Police Department are already members of, or familiar with, drug organizations in the city and have access to higher-profile targets.

“A lot of them will reach out to us for various reasons. Some of them, it is through our own enforcement that you’ll make an arrest on someone, and to try to help their own cause will want to work ... and sometimes that leads to bigger fish,” he said.

But he said that while the emphasis is on traffickers, the Police Department won’t drop charges on anyone and reserves future deals for the prosecuting attorney or judge.

“If they get arrested out here on their own, they’re on their own,” Robertson said. “We don’t give them a get-out-of-jail-free card just because you’re a confidential informant. You still got to do right.”

Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley said criminal informants are rarely the “linchpin” holding a case together and that negotiations with informants to provide information in other cases are almost always reserved until after their trials.

“I’m not saying that sweetheart deals don’t happen, but I think the wiser and safer path is to let the system work the way it’s intended to work,” Jegley said.

THE INFORMANTS

The Police Department has 1,994 informants in a computerized file, accessible only to authorized members of the department. Robertson said their informants are white and black, felons and lesser convicted criminals.

He said the department also employs some juveniles, although internal policies require a parent or guardian’s permission before they can be signed up.

Robertson said informants will come and go and are sometimes not heard from for years. Only 230 informants have received any kind of payment since January 2007, records show.

The bulk of the $611,301.43 paid to informants between Jan. 1, 2007, is denoted with a drug or operation entitled “N/A,” which Robertson said represents a tip provided by an informant.

Those payments, accounting for $317,161.43, are listed in almost every informant’s file and sometimes represent all of the work an informant provides for the department.

The most targeted drug in operations involving informants is cocaine, including powder, crack cocaine or other forms, accounting for more than $200,000 in payments.

While some informants are paid only for providing information or for a single operation, others have been used for hundreds of operations. One informant, designated as “NDI1496” in police files, has been paid more than $50,000.

According to that informant’s payment history with the department, NDI1496 was paid $25,075 for providing information, $25,830 for operations involving cocaine, $2,340 for marijuana operations and $180 for those involving methamphetamine - a total of 421 payments.

Robertson said the operations an informant takes part in and their flexibility to work different kinds of cases usually “depends on the environment that they run in.”

“Some are just more in the know of what’s going on, some it’s just a one-time deal for them, for whatever reason it may be, or just a one-time deal for us,” he said.

FEW REGULATIONS

While the use of informants in police departments is widespread across the country, the practice is largely unregulated. In Arkansas, no legislation addresses the rights of informants or restricts the kinds of operations they may be involved in.

Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School who has researched the use of confidential informants extensively, said the “gold standard” for policies and regulations is the U.S. attorney general’s guidelines for the FBI’s use of confidential informants.

Natapoff said the Little Rock Police Department should be commended for having internal policies for signing up and keeping track of confidential informants. Many departments, she said, could not say how many informants they use because such record-keeping is not required in most states.

But Natapoff said the number of informants employed by Little Rock police - a ratio of almost four informants to every one officer - is “pretty staggering.”

“It’s objectively a lot whether everybody does it or not,” she said. “That’s a lot of criminals being run by very few police.”

Natapoff said the lack of regulations and record-keeping is one of the challenges of the world of confidential informants. She said the use of informants is “inherently secret,” but there should be public discourse to establish policy that could protect informants - including age limits or restricting the use of people in drug treatment programs.

“I think the more people realize that this is actually how it’s done - all the time, every day - that this is normal, it’s not an aberration, it’s not a mistake, it happens all over the country, that that is the greatest force for making better public policy,” Natapoff said.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/17/2012

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