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19 Police Stud.: Int'l Rev. Police Dev. 1 (1996)
A Risky Business: The Recruitment and Running of Informers by English Police Officers

handle is hein.journals/polic19 and id is 109 raw text is: POLICE STUDIES, VOL. 19, No. 2 1996 1 A Risky Business: The Recruitment and Running of Informers By English Police Officers* Colin Dunnighan* University of Durham, England Clive Norris University of Hull, England ABSTRACT The movement, in the United Kingdom, towards the adoption of proactive policing strategies, and the concomitant emphasis on the use of informers, has resulted in police managers actively encouraging detective officers to increase their use of what is seen by them as a useful resource. However, such managerial exhortations have not been accompanied by the introduction of satisfactory control mechanisms. Drawing on data obtained over a two year period from detailed interviews with detectives and informers, a comprehensive questionnaire and the examination of police files, the paper identifies negative consequences that informer-based policing policies are producing for individual officers, police forces and ultimately, the criminal justice system. INTRODUCTION Having played a role in the British legal system for far longer than organized police forces have existed, the use of informers is not a novel method of crime detection. However, recent years have seen law enforcement agencies placing increasing emphasis upon the more proactive use of intelligence resources and surveillance techniques for offender targeting and the investigation of crime. Central to such strategies is the requirement for good intelligence systems of which one of the main tools is the informer. Although there exists a considerable body of North American literature on the role of the agent provocateur in undercover police operations (e.g. Caplan, 1983; Donnelly, 1951; Hamey and Cross, 1968; Marx, 1974; 1985; 1988, 1992) and * Aversion of this paper was presented at the 1995 American Society of Criminology Conference, Boston. It is based on the research project The Role of the Informer in the Criminal Justice System which was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. * * The authors extend their thanks to Lawrence F. Travis and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. In order to preserve anonymity, all names used in this paper are pseudonyms. In addition, without changing details relevant to the findings, certain other identifying characteristics have been altered.

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