Confidential informants (CI) are considered useful to law enforcement investigations, so society is just expected to bear the burden of criminal acts committed by informants in (dubious) furtherance of public safety goals.
CI’s are just criminals with more immunity than most — even when they happen to be some of the worst criminals imaginable.
In particular, in 2005, Quintana was convicted of Aggravated Battery Against a Household Member with a Deadly Weapon after battering his wife in front of his wife’s children, arming himself with a handgun and pressing it against his wife’s mouth, saying “I want to kill you, you fucking bitch.”
[…]
Within a month, Mr. Quintana began sexually abusing Jason Estrada’s minor son, JGE, who was then five years old. The abuse continued until February 20, 2013, when Mr. Quintana and his family moved out of the Estrada residence.
[…]
On April 3, 2013, Mr. Quintana and two other men travelled to the Estrada residence. In the presence of JGE, they beat and shot Jason Estrada, who died from his injuries.
That’s the story of one of the DEA’s informants — one who only “deactivated” after he’d already battered his wife, raped his son, and — with the assistance of two accomplices — beat and pumped bullets into his own child until he was dead. The only thing “deactivation” meant was that the DEA was going to stop paying Quintana and stop protecting him from prosecution. Nothing suggests the DEA felt anything other than slightly less strain on its checkbook following this string of horrific events.
What’s often ignored is that undercover officers can also engage in illegal activities without being treated like criminals. Obviously, the nature of job means undercover officers can’t obey all the laws without exposing themselves as cops. But officers working undercover or (more temporarily) engaging in stings seem to consider undercover work a useful excuse to engage in criminal acts.
But what’s often ignored is the other damage these officers do. Not only do they aid and abet criminal organizations while engaging in undercover investigations, but anything they do to maintain their cover is considered acceptable collateral damage. While society may — in general — obtain next to noting in terms of public safety gains, members of the same society these officers consider themselves to be saving are often the victims of cops granted an excessive amount of discretion and impunity.
This report from George Monbiot for The Guardian details the havoc wreaked by so-called “spy cops” (to use the UK parlance for undercover work). One long-term operative, who has received commendations for his “service,” used his undercover position to disrupt and harm the lives of innocent people he interacted with while performing this work.
Bob Lambert worked for the Metropolitan police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in the 1980s and 1990s, first as an undercover cop infiltrating environmental and animal rights protests, then as operational controller of the squad, supervising other spy cops doing similar work. In the course of his undercover assignments, while posing as a radical activist called Bob Robinson, he deceived four unsuspecting women, innocent of any crime, into starting relationships. He stole his identity from a dead child.
With one of the women, Jacqui, he fathered a child. Two years later, he vanished. She discovered his true identity by chance more than 20 years later, and has yet to recover from the devastating shock. She says she feels “raped by the state”.
Lambert wasn’t the only “spy cop” to do this sort of thing, although he did at least advise other officers to “wear condoms” when starting up bogus relationships with people who weren’t even targets of ongoing investigations. As Monbiot puts it, UK law enforcement appears to tacitly approve of “state-sanctioned grooming operations,” so long as undercover officers occasionally produce a lead or two while not impregnating people they’ve lied to during the entirety of their relationships.
That’s terrible and is definitely something no law enforcement agency should condone. But so is this, for similar reasons, even if they don’t involve impregnating someone and abandoning them as soon as the investigation shifts focus.
We now know that Lambert and other police spies repeatedly lied in court when they were arraigned as “activists” on minor charges, using their fake names to maintain their cover. They withheld crucial evidence from the trials of genuine activists, whom they had stitched up: the courts were not informed of their role. As a result, many environmental campaigners have now had their convictions overturned.
Not only are these officers never disciplined, they’re actually rewarded for being so good at deception they’ve actively harmed innocent people who had the misfortune of trusting them.
None of the spy cops have suffered legal consequences, though activities such as identity theft and entering homes without a warrant are illegal. Their pensions remain intact, they have kept their medals and commendations. On Tuesday at the inquiry, Belinda Harvey, one of the women deceived into an 18-month relationship with Lambert, damned him as a “cruel and manipulative” liar. But the authorities see him differently. In 2008, Lambert received an MBE for services to the police.
Nothing will change because of this. But the reporting is still useful, even if the most it can do is highlight the perception gap between cops and civilians. Few regular people would consider these actions to be an acceptable way to engage in undercover investigations. And even fewer cops would agree with the majority of the public, which tends to believe this much power must be tied to a certain amount of responsibility.
But cops simply don’t care what the public thinks, even though they are literally “public servants.” Whatever keeps them loaded up with pensions, promotions, and citations is always considered acceptable behavior. As for the mothers left to care for the children left behind by undercover cops, the government at large appears to be just as unsympathetic. The innocent are acceptable offerings on the altar of law and order, as they always have been and are always expected to be.
