OK, I feel very naive now! I am quite shocked by this. Is this a thing throughout the USA? I'm pretty sure I've never heard of anything remotely like this in the UK (maybe being naive again, please correct me if I'm wrong.)

The US plea-bargain system seems to have so much potential for abuse.

EDIT: So many questions are coming to mind now. Like, why would the police entrust something like this to an untrained, highly stressed, and unreliable person when they could just use a plain-clothes officer?

Wouldn't it be very embarrassing for the police if the undercover guy freaked out and ruined the investigation?

Is their plea-bargain dependent on the success of the other sting? So staying out of jail could be dependent on their acting ability? Because if so that's absolutely insane.

I don't know the first thing about law enforcement in the UK, so I have no idea. But yes, I don't think this would be unusual anywhere in the US. You aren't wrong in saying that the plea bargain system is ripe for abuse, not just in that way but in the more prosaic way that it makes it possible for prosecutors to railroad defendants into confessing to things they didn't do.

> Like, why would the police entrust something like this to an untrained, highly stressed, and unreliable person when they could just use a plain-clothes officer?

How many undercover gigs can you do before people start to catch on? Also, whoever you want to target may already know the informant and have some implicit level of trust in them.

> Also, whoever you want to target may already know the informant and have some implicit level of trust in them.

Yeah, I get the idea of using an informant who is linked to the person you're trying to catch. It makes sense as a way of gathering evidence against more serious criminals. It's a grey area, but broadly speaking I think it's ethically ok.

What I'm having a problem with from an ethical point of view is taking someone who just happens to have been arrested for an unrelated crime, and coercing them into doing undercover police work for you. This person hasn't been to trial yet, might be completely innocent, and is going to be placed into a potentially dangerous and definitely stressful situation.

That's why I was shocked by the article - it makes it sound as though Gideon didn't know Frank. Maybe the author just glossed over some link between them.

What are the safeguards around this? To give an absurd example, what's stopping the police from arresting someone for, say, taking a piss in a back alley, and then sending them in to infiltrate a violent criminal gang?

There are some more nuances to this than the article lets on; striking deals like this typically tends to revolve more around getting at those higher up in a chain, for example, giving a dealer community service in exchange for ratting out their supplier.

The story from the article feels like it's missing details that were either intentionally obscured to protect someone, left out for effect, absent-mindedly left out, or other possibilities. Your suspicions are indeed correct that it wouldn't make a lot of sense to put someone into a sting operation they have little to do with, since it's very easy to blow the entire operation.

This is not really a plea bargaining issue. That is a court supervised process and it would be highly unusual for a court to approve an arrangement like that. The police accomplish this sort of coercion by promising the informant not to refer the case for prosecution in the first place.

Unfortunately there is nothing illegal about the practice. It's not extortion to coerce someone with something you're legally entitled to do. We'd need a new law banning the use of criminal informants in situations like these. (Ideally, banning the use of criminal informants without a court order.)

The UK takes a rather longer term approach to abusive undercover situations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_undercover_policing_relatio...

Good point. I was aware of the Mark Kennedy thing. It's utterly shameful.

I certainly didn't mean to imply some kind of moral superiority over the US system. Our police have done some appalling, corrupt things. Conducting surveillance on the family of Stephen Lawrence is another one that springs to mind.

Yes and no. It really depends on the department and the nature of the crime.

Bad behavior is mostly reserved for departments and precincts with too much time on their hands and can make the jump from keeping the community generally safe and free of violence to enforcing the law because it's there to be enforced.

You don't have time to keep tabs on informants, organize unnecessary raids, call all your buddies to beat some black guy to a pulp and write tickets for tail lights when you've got actual calls to respond to.

edit: Thanks for the down-votes, care to share why you disagree?

my nephiew got arrested for vandalizing a building during a time I took him to an amusement park. the person who did it said he was an accomplice because they said they would give him a lighter sentence if he turned his 'partners' in. he didnt have any, so he just named some people

That sounds awful. It does make you wonder what could have happened if you hadn't been there to provide a clear alibi.