Francesca Sinacori attended an orientation for parents of newly minted University of Massachusetts at Amherst students in June 2011. Her son had just enrolled as a freshman there, and though she was nervous about him leaving home, she felt comfortable. The college had its own police department with sworn officers — her son would be safe.
She remembers a session on drugs and underage drinking. The severity of sanctions for violating drug and alcohol policy, whether a reprimand or a suspension or drug education, would be decided on a case-by-case basis. But one point was clear: Parents of students under 21 would be notified.
Just over two years later, in October 2013, her son Eric Sinacori was dead, of a heroin overdose. Campus police had previously caught Mr. Sinacori selling LSD and MDMA, and given him the option to keep the offense under wraps, a far cry from what Ms. Sinacori had been told at orientation. If he agreed to assist the police as a confidential informant, they would not press charges, or tell his parents.
The Boston Globe detailed the shocking circumstances of Mr. Sinacori’s death in a 2014 investigation. To the public, the revelation cast light on a little-known practice in academe.
It never occurred to people that a university would permit its students to be treated that way, says Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine who studies informants. “It’s unfortunate that it takes tragedies to educate the public.”
The use of confidential informants to aid in narcotics investigations is widespread in law enforcement. But when asked about the effectiveness of the practice, people in the field, including prosecutors, rarely provide any evidence beyond “we always have, and we think it works,” said Diane Curtis, a senior lecturer in political science at the Amherst campus.
Ms. Curtis was a member of a working group at the university that was convened in 2014 to evaluate the campus police department’s confidential-informant program in the wake of Mr. Sinacori’s death. In her deep dive into the subject in those subsequent months, she was surprised by the apparent lack of academic research supporting the use of confidential informants in general, let alone on college campuses.
The working group’s report recommended that campus police end the program, or make changes to mitigate potential harmful effects. The chancellor chose to shut it down.
Use of confidential informants is little discussed, as some in law enforcement will say, because of the obvious: By nature, the practice is confidential. Awareness of such programs — which have potentially life-threatening implications — and their use by university police departments is fairly low, limited to a few local or regional reports on the deaths of college students like Mr. Sinacori, or big drug roundups at universities.
The Chronicle obtained scores of confidential-informant policies through public-records requests from police departments at the 100 largest public colleges by overall student enrollment, across the country. Here’s an overview of what we found:
- Well over half of the responding campuses had policies that outlined guidelines for use of confidential informants.
- The majority of colleges that released their policies said they did not use confidential informants regularly as standard practice, or at least not in the past five years.
- But quite a few campuses actively use informants on an annual basis — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s police department said it uses about 20 to 30 students a year, while Virginia Commonwealth University said it uses about six.
Check out the policies of dozens of public colleges in the table below.
Other universities, such as Ohio University and the University of Virginia, may not use informants themselves, but partner with local or regional narcotics task forces that do use them. The most well-documented cases include the University of Mississippi’s participation in the Lafayette County Metro Narcotics Unit and the University of Alabama’s participation in the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force.
Use of informants by campus police is markedly less prevalent as compared with use by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, said Sue Riseling, executive director of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. But it does happen. And it’s widely recognized that the practice can be dangerous for those involved, especially without comprehensive police policies and procedures in place.
‘A Fraught Process’
As fervor over the “war on drugs” grew in the 1970s, federal money flowed to law enforcement’s narcotics efforts. The government’s relentless push to put drug offenders behind bars profoundly informed the culture and practices of agencies at every level, from local to federal. Police stockpiled military equipment, were empowered to seize cash and property at a slight hint of illegal activity, and relied increasingly on use of confidential informants to assist investigations.
Drug investigations are not limited by campus borders or jurisdictional lines, and so campus police departments staffed with armed officers who have powers of arrest were caught up in the drug-war frenzy.
But if universities develop their own informant programs to tackle drug dealers on campus, not many of them talk about it openly. “Ones that do it, don’t talk about it, because it defeats the confidential nature of what they’re doing,” Ms. Riseling said.
Ones that do it, don’t talk about it, because it defeats the confidential nature of what they’re doing.
A few colleges, citing exemptions that protect police surveillance techniques, denied The Chronicle’s requests for police policy on confidential-informant use. These colleges include the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of North Texas, San Francisco State University, and Eastern Michigan University, among others.
“The inherent nature of cutting a deal with one person who’s allegedly committed a crime to go after another person is a fraught process that folks might not want to talk about,” said Robert Sand, an assistant professor of law at Vermont Law School and a former prosecutor.
The University of Wisconsin at Whitewater developed its confidential-informant program in 2012. With widespread opioid use consuming the time and attention of larger drug units in the neighborhood, campus police found themselves on their own in fighting drug abuse on campus. The campus police chief, Matt Kiederlen, said the department created its informant program to fill the gap and investigate chains of drug supply to campus.
Of the colleges surveyed, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was one of the few that provided specific numbers, and has one of the largest informant programs The Chronicle was able to identify. Its campus police department used 88 students as confidential informants from 2012 to 2015, or about 20 students each year (though the number of informants annually, including nonstudents, often runs upward of 30).
An informant actively assisting drug investigations in the field is distinct from a confidential source, who simply provides information to police. Many university police departments, Ms. Riseling said, receive information from confidential sources but don’t necessarily use informants.
Students who become informants usually do it in exchange for having criminal charges dropped or lessened, or to escape academic sanctions and parental notification. Informants are also sometimes paid.
Thomas Betz, the directing attorney of student legal services at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has seen things from the informant’s point of view. Every year, around five to seven students come into his office for counsel on potential drug possession charges (usually marijuana), having been given the option of being a confidential informant, either by local police or campus police.
In the cases he’s seen, which are mostly low-level possession charges since the office refers students with harsher charges to public defenders or private lawyers, police agree not to press charges if students make four or five “controlled buys.” His advice to students is usually this: You should only consider it if you’re facing a serious charge, not a simple possession.
But even then, he said, the costs are probably not worth the benefits. Being an informant is a “risky business,” Mr. Betz said, and whatever security measures are taken, you can’t predict who’s on the other side of the door. Even if the buy itself doesn’t go sour, there’s the potential threat of retaliation after the fact.
From what he can tell, the students who have come to his office, he says, have been told by the police they have a right to seek legal counsel. But Eric Sinacori was alone when he made the decision to be an informant, the Globe reported. With no one to turn to, not his parents and certainly not a lawyer, he later felt even more lost and alone as he grappled with the moral implications of having to “snitch” on his friends.
An Arrest Numbers Game
It is less common for campus police to use informants on their own than for departments to join local or regional drug task forces, Ms. Riseling said, because campus police are not likely to engage in the higher levels of drug investigations alone.
Hundreds of regional narcotics task forces sprang to life as funding for the drug war proliferated. Some colleges funnel personnel, equipment, and money to these units, for which informants are indispensable to investigations. The University of California at Davis, for example, has given $105,850 since 2012 to the Yolo Narcotics Enforcement Task Force, in addition to “in kind” contributions including officer time and equipment.
Cmdr. Dennis Lowe of the Fairfield, Hocking, Athens Major Crimes Unit says his task force uses informants to work vertically up the chain of supply to catch the big dealers, often for stimulants, hallucinogens, and depressants like opioids that his task force sees around Ohio University. Of the 10 to 12 active informants his unit might have at any given time, most are locals rather than students, he says, and there are fewer investigations on campus than off.
But many multijurisdictional drug task forces, including those that the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama work with, have been criticized for heavy-handed tactics in targeting students for low-level offenses. In 2013, the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force used confidential informants to make a huge drug bust on campus: It rounded up 74 people, the majority of whom were students, and charged most of them for minor counts of marijuana possession.
The number of charges attributed to work by the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force has increased every year since 2008, according to a 2016 AL.com report. The commander of the task force, Wayne Robertson, told the news site that he partially credited this to the University of Alabama’s growing student population.
Getting funding for these task forces is an arrest numbers game: The Lafayette County Metro Narcotics Unit, known to recruit University of Mississippi students, made three times as many arrests for marijuana as for any other drug, and in the task force’s early years, those numbers allowed it to secure almost half of its budget through federal grants, BuzzFeed reports.
Charles DiMare, the former director of student legal services at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who served on the working group that recommended shutting down the college’s informant program, called the use of confidential informants “completely inappropriate and borderline outrageous” in the case of low-level drugs like marijuana. But using informants to tackle organized crime and harder drugs like heroin, he said, is more reasonable.
Back in Ohio, Mr. Lowe takes pride in the steps his department takes to ensure the safety of informants. For example, if a subject was known to have weapons or a violent criminal history, that would affect whether the department sees an informant or undercover officer as feasible. When Mr. Lowe is recruiting informants, he often tells them: “These drug transactions are going to be the safest drug deals you’ve ever been involved with.”
His unit has never had an informant injured or killed on the job. “Knock on wood,” Mr. Lowe said.
But some experts, like Lance Block, a Florida lawyer who often represents confidential informants, note that drug crimes tend to be some of the most violent, and that a decades-long culture that treats informants as inexpensive and disposable tools puts their safety even more at risk.
When Catastrophe Strikes
Ms. Sinacori, in her lawsuit against the university, alleges that the campus was obligated to inform her of her son’s drug activity per its own policy, but that instead, she was kept in the dark. She takes issue with “police using kids to do their jobs, without first contacting an attorney or parent.”
When people are arrested for drug possession, police are legally obligated to inform them of their right to remain silent and their right to speak to a lawyer. But often, officers recruiting informants simply detain students rather than arresting them, and thus are not bound by law to read them their Miranda rights.
Mr. Sinacori, like many recruited to be confidential informants, was under pressure. He thought he was facing five years in jail minimum, the loss of $40,000 in scholarship money, and the deep disappointment of his parents.
There are few legal protections or controls in place for the young people asked to wear a wire and make drug buys with no training, frequently under the impression that the only other option is serious jail time. Such protections often come only after the process goes wrong, and an informant ends up dead.
Rachel Hoffman, at the time a recent graduate of Florida State University, was told by the Tallahassee Police Department that she was looking at three years in prison for five ounces of marijuana and a few Ecstasy and Valium pills. Andrew Sadek, a student at North Dakota State College of Science, was told by an officer from a local task force that he would face two felony charges with up to 40 years in prison and tens of thousands of dollars in fines for selling $80 worth of marijuana.
Mr. Sadek went missing two weeks before his graduation, and was found dead in the Red River over a year later. Ms. Hoffman entered a sting that went horribly awry: Wired up, with 19 law-enforcement agents backing her up, she disappeared, and her body was found in a town about 50 miles away from Tallahassee. She had been shot five times.
A grand jury that reviewed Hoffman’s case found “negligent conduct” on the part of local police and federal law enforcement, including their failure to notify the state attorney before using her as an informant and their hazy plan for the operation.
The Whitewater campus’s chief of police, Mr. Kiederlen, says that situations like Ms. Hoffman’s and Mr. Sadek’s are extreme, and that Whitewater’s informant program follows safety measures built in to prevent situations like those. His detectives consult with the district attorney before making an agreement with the informant. The department also conducts background checks on individuals the informant is likely to interact with in the course of his or her work.
And if there’s an indication of a propensity toward violence, police don’t go through with it: “We are not going to walk into a situation we are uncomfortable with,” Mr. Kiederlen said.
The reality is most of them we never hear about.
At some law-enforcement agencies, police don’t have the unilateral discretion to enter into a confidentiality agreement. Instead, they have to receive the prosecutor’s approval, since the prosecutor makes the ultimate charging decisions.
But in many cases, confidential-informant programs are unregulated, with little oversight. As Mr. Block puts it, “nobody’s policing the police.”
“The reality is most of them we never hear about — you hear about it, pardon the language, when the shit hits the fan,” Mr. Sand said.
The deaths of Ms. Hoffman and Mr. Sadek prompted legislation at the state level: Florida approved “Rachel’s Law” in 2009, which established minimum standards for use of informants in the state, and North Dakota’s “Andrew’s Law,” pushed through the legislature by Mr. Sadek’s parents, was signed by the governor in April.
Andrew’s Law, unlike Rachel’s Law, expressly stipulates that campus police cannot use college students as confidential informants. Both create rules that law-enforcement officers must follow when deciding who should and shouldn’t be used as an informant.
A Process of Scrutiny
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst police department’s written policy for confidential informants had allowed the use of addicts as confidential informants, but recommended “additional precautions.” The department first adopted its policy in 2009 to comply with police accrediting agencies, but like most police departments, it had already been using confidential informants for a long time.
For many law-enforcement agencies, there’s a process of scrutiny, said John Merrigan, who handles narcotics cases for the Vermont State Police. Not everyone is allowed to be an informant, and informants are not supposed to be using drugs. But Mr. Merrigan has seen informants overdose before. “It’s sad but not shocking,” he says, considering the lifestyle they come from. “Nobody likes the informant business, including those of us that are in it,” he said.
Lt. Joe McCullough of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign police department’s Narcotics and Street Crimes Unit, has been working for the better part of seven years to change the culture of the confidential-informants program to better care for people with substance-abuse problems. Officers at the University of Illinois tell their prospective informants that they can reach out to their lawyer or their parents, according to Mr. McCullough, though these procedures are not reflected in the written policy.
Trained in undercover narcotics back in 2002, Mr. McCullough was put off by the cynical culture around the use of confidential informants. Addicts were thought of as lost causes, as disposable sources of information. He said he felt like they were overlooking lives with that attitude.
Nobody likes the informant business, including those of us that are in it.
Now, if Urbana-Champaign’s police department catches a lower-level dealer who shows signs of being an addict, in the process of interviewing the unit affords the student an opportunity to meet with a drug counselor, and may administer a narcotics test. He calls it a “community-based” approach. “I don’t want to introduce or reintroduce them to a world they are trying to get out of,” Mr. McCullough said. The department uses this method with about two to five people per year, Mr. McCullough said, out of the 30 or more confidential informants it enlists each year, going back to around 2010.
College confidential-informant policies run the gamut in scope of detail. Some, like the University of Central Florida’s, note that a person’s problems with substance abuse or emotional stability should be considered as factors in their suitability as an informant, but don’t stipulate clear rules or limits. The majority of policies reviewed, for example the University of Washington’s, are entirely silent on how police decide whether an informant is qualified, though almost all policies, at the minimum, have additional checks in place to approve the use of juveniles as informants.
Craig Wilson, commander of University of Washington Police Department, says the department has used confidential informants in the past, but the last time it used one (on its own, not in an assisting role) was in 2012. Marijuana is now legal in the state, which he says has greatly decreased the need for them.
Ms. Riseling said departments may have informant policies even though their use is not standard practice, because law enforcement agencies will often prepare for methods they hope they never have to use: “We have policies on shooting people — use of force. You pray to God you never use them.”
Florida State University’s chief of police, David Perry, said Rachel’s Law forced his department to better document the process of using informants. In the past, he said much of the communication was only verbal, and now participants must sign explicit agreements.
Before, informants may have “misunderstood” the terms of their service: For example, they might get the impression that their charges would be lessened or removed. In actuality, those considerations are not up to law enforcement, but to the state or district attorney.
What Are the Effects?
Mr. Merrigan said folks in law enforcement are less tight-lipped about using informants than they were 10 years ago. Still, the practice is largely shrouded, as shown by several campus police departments’ refusals to release informant policies.
Murky though it may be, the practice is often necessary to keep criminal operations from taking hold on campuses, said Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University. In that way, he said, students are protected from life-threatening drugs.
Administrators, though, often have to pick up the pieces of confidential investigations, whether that means protecting an individual student or managing campus perceptions. He added that administrators have an independent responsibility to ensure student safety that police — even campus police — just don’t have.
It’s invariably difficult to gauge the effectiveness of a confidential-informant program. But Mr. Kiederlen says he thinks Whitewater’s is working because it has gotten more difficult for detectives and informants to get drug dealers on campus: “Word on the street is it’s too hot at UW Whitewater, and to me that screams success.”
And according to Mr. McCullough, becoming an informant is a chance at a clean slate. Students with little to no criminal background start experimenting, and they get caught up in more serious drugs. Make a few buys, and the looming threat of a criminal record is just gone. They escape punishment, and their futures as productive, tax-paying members of society are back on track.
But to others, including the parents whose children have died while acting as informants, the practice seems manipulative, exploiting a vulnerable population with little oversight, regulation, or transparency.
Narcotics investigations are the most dangerous type of police work, said Mr. Block, the Florida lawyer. “We don’t use college kids or civilians to write parking tickets or direct traffic, but we use them to go undercover and wear a wire.”
When Ms. Curtis stepped back to examine UMass Amherst’s program, she said she concluded there wasn’t malice or intentional exploitation. The problem is a knowledge gap.
She could hardly find academic studies on the practice, only discovering advice on how to make the practice work, for example: How do you ensure this is reliable testimony? How do you manage an informant? The strategic piece from the law-enforcement side is there, but the more elusive, sociological impact on those employed as informants is unknown — what are the effects on them?
“We found very little information” in that regard, Ms. Curtis said of the working group. Even demographic information is lacking — it is rare that a police department collects statistical records, let alone releases them to the public.
In the end, Ms. Curtis said, the logic of the working group that recommended UMass close its program was this: Given that we don’t know the potential adverse effects on students, maybe we shouldn’t be using them as informants.
Francesca Sinacori, too, thinks if she had known what was going on, things might have been different for her son. “If I was informed, then I would have known my son had an issue,” Ms. Sinacori said. “I think I would have been able to help him. But I never got that opportunity, and therefore I’ll never know. And they took that right away from me.”
Dan Bauman contributed to this article.
Correction (10/19/2017, 6:57 p.m.): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Ms. Sinacori attended the university’s orientation for parents in June 2012. It was June 2011. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
