Crime & Punishment

I just have to make it to next Monday and this course revision is done. Right now 90% of my working memory is about police, courts and prisons. The other 10% has trouble doing anything else. I have even press-ganged Steph into this process. I never wanted to teach a course like this - in fact I probably got this job through connections I made on protest marches. It's like some ironic punishment. But the deep truth is that crime pays... if all crime were to disappear a huge number of North Americans would find themselves unemployed.

The treat I'm giving myself in this revision is to include a section called 'Glasgow, the Atlantic Trade and the Origin of Policing' when I explore how the slave trade, smuggling, and two Glasgow custom officials (Patrick Colquhoun & Adam Smith) combined to pioneered the theory and practice of 'policing'. Other new section include "Why no one collects statistics on how many people are killed by police", "Harper's Omnibus Crime Bill and the Politics of Retribution", "Informants and the War on Terror" and "Political Patronage and the Appointment of Judges".

The worst part of this is that after a decade of Conservative rule, Steve Harper has been able to leave his stamp on the Canadian justice system and steer the ship of state right toward the jagged rocks of mass incarceration. We are at the point were actual Texas Sheriffs are coming to Canada to warn us that we've gone too far with 'tough-on-crime' legislation.

There is so much human suffering lying beneath the statistics in a course like this - so it hard to watch ideological madmen direct it based on the twin principles of 'free-market models' and 'punishment gets votes'.

So many angry ghosts, so much bloody history, so many broken people, so many sobbing families, so much sadism and racism - and this faint tolling bell that I can almost hear ringing after a hard night of typing - it rings with something like the hope of justice. If you really dig and dig and dig through all the statistics and critiques and reforms and badges and gravels and cages, there is this face of humanity that is staring back at you. It is hard for a modern person like myself to met a gaze that carries the weight of the ages - but I'm beginning to realize that someday I'll be part of the face staring out and another generation will have to stare at it in hopes of figuring out this mess.

Martin Luther King Jr said it best: “Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.“

Hello June! I'm Done!

To celebrate I'm posting up the part I wrote on informants. This is for a 2nd year introductory class - so the text is short and simple - but I think it gets across enough to get people thinking.


INFORMANTS

A rarely discussed but important 'working ability' for many officers is the handling of informants. Physical evidence may get convictions but it often 'snitches' who first identifies suspects. No one likes informants but from Judas Iscariot (Imperial Roman informant on radical cults) to Ronald Reagan (FBI informant on Hollywood leftists) they have profoundly shaped history (Herhold, 1985).

Over the last two decades law enforcement dependence on informants has grown and many countries have introduced policies to facilitating this by offering financial incentives, protection, or leniency in exchange for information or testimony.   As a result, "the 'flipping' of criminals is now a central approach in the investigation [and] increasing organizational pressures are exerted on police officers to recruit and establish long-term relationships with criminal trade participants" For example, in 1975 the FBI had 1,500 informants, during the 1980s the number had quadrupled to 6,000 due to the 'War of Drugs', in 2004 a presidential directive gave the FBI an additional 13 million dollars to increase informants with it now has a "network of over 15,000 informants, the largest network of spies ever to exist in the United States." (Aaronson, 2013)

The benefit of increased intelligence from informants has its dark side because  informants are becoming increasingly powerful within the justice system. Considering most informants are criminals themselves this is a worrying trend. A former Drug Enforcement Agent who had "close association with more than 10,000 confidential informants" vividly describes them as "traitorous information whores who betray friendships, relatives, business and/or criminal associates, nations, and even terrorist organizations. They are criminals and con-men who use their insider positions of trust to steal and barter information that can and often does destroy those who most trust them." (Levine 2009)

Some informants snitch for emotional reason like vengeance but most often have strong legal and financial incentives to produce information that can lead to a conviction. Informants can receive payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars per case and in one infamous case,

"a federal narcotic task force in New Mexico, took a child rapist who had raped so many young boys in the past that “he lost count,” as their undercover informant. While working under the protection of the feds, the informant continued to rape young boys. The allegations are that the feds knew that their informant was the predatory rapist being hunted by local police and continued to protect him so that he would not be discredited as a witness in a drug case." (expertwitnessradio.org)

In Focus - Informants and the War on Terror

The 'Wars' on Drug and Terror have been boom times for informants.  Studies have found that nearly 50% of the federal terrorism convictions since 9-11 resulted from informants, 30% were sting operations where the informant played an active role in the underlying plot and in 10% of cases the informant was an agent provocateur—an FBI operative who actually instigated the terrorist action. As a Human Right Watch study into the subject concludes "with three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings" - a fact that is rarely mentioned in the resulting media coverage. (HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 2014)

A typical FBI counterterrorism operation involves examining all the immigration data and taxi licences of a city's Muslim population looking for any violations that can be used to create informants. Potential informants are then offered legal and cash incentives to turn over any 'terrorists' they can find, so the informants will hang around a mosque until they can befriend some “powerless braggarts” in their early twenties or someone with mental health issues and together they plot 'terrorist' attacks. At this point the FBI swoops into to make a high-profile arrest.

Most such 'terrorists' caught in this manner live on the "fringes of society, occupying neither the skills nor the financial resources necessary to execute an attack on their own and who never came into contact with Al Qaeda or any other terrorist network whatsoever."  One ex-FBI agent described the 19 year-old Somali-American student convicted of trying to bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony as "a kid who, it can be reasonably inferred, barely had the capacity to put his shoes on in the morning.” (Aaronson, 2011) In the case of the “Newburgh Four,” accused of planning to attack a US military base, a judge said the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” and had made a 'terrorist' out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.” (HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 2014)

The CSIS informant who brought about the conviction of the 'Toronto 18' for their plans to behead the Prime Minster had wanted $2.7 million or he would refuse to testify but only paid $300,000. This informant was also the only member of the terrorist group with any military training, firearm experience or even a driver's licence. The training videos the group produced are almost comedic with teenage 'terrorists' jumping over camp fires, doing doughnuts in Canadian Tire parking lots, giggling during their jihadi speeches, and frequenting the local coffee shop still dressed in fatigues. (Teotonio 2010) A RCMP informant was also brought in to arrange a phony fertilizer purchase on behalf of the youths so charges relating to explosives could be laid, this informant wanted $14-million for his efforts but was paid only $500,000 (FREEZE AND AKKAD, 2007) . Without the aid of such highly-paid informants the group seemed unlikely to accomplish anything.

The case of Rezwan Ferdaus is similar. Despite an FBI agent admitting that  Ferdaus  had “obvious” mental health problems, he was targeted for a sting operation and an informant was sent to his mosque. Together, the informant and Ferdaus devised a plan to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol, with the FBI providing fake weaponry and funding their travel. The stress of the fake plot was so hard on Ferdaus that he began suffering seizures and depression so badly that his father had to quit his job to care for him. Ferdaus pled guilty and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. (HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 2014)

The currently legal climate is so hostile to terrorism that almost every suspect is convicted with a lengthy sentence and prosecutors "can introducing evidence obtained by coercion, classified evidence that cannot be fairly contested, and inflammatory evidence about terrorism in which defendants played no part, asserting government secrecy claims to limit challenges to surveillance warrants," additionally "the bar on entrapment in US law is so high that it’s almost impossible for a terrorism suspect to prove." (HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 2014) Law enforcement agencies are under heavy political pressure to stop terrorist attacks, and when this pressure is combined with financial rewards for informants and a vulnerable population of Muslim males, especially the young, the poor and those with mental or developmental disabilities, and "you have a recipe for rampant human rights abuses” under the guise of safety. (HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH 2014)