Snitches being paid less
Technology advances negate the need to use informants, writes Charlotte Carter
POLICE informants have pocketed just under $2 million dollars in the past eight years.
Data obtained under the Official Information Act show police paid people who snitch on criminals a total of $1,948,845 between 2010 and 2018.
However, the sums being paid out have been decreasing year on year from $416,000 in 2011-12 to the lowest amount of $92,543, recorded for the 2017-18 financial year. Police would not comment on the reason for the lower spending.
In 2017, while Police Minister Stuart Nash was still in opposition as the Labour Party’s police spokesman, criticised the police’s lack of disclosure when it came to informants and said it was not good enough. ‘‘Informants’ evidence is often queried, and its credibility called to question,’’ he told RNZ.
Nash said he wondered whether it was a deliberate ploy by the police because informants and their testimonies were not leading to successful prosecutions, or whether the criminal fraternity had stopped speaking to police.
Sunday News approached Nash for comment last week in his role as police minister but his press secretary said he could not discuss it ‘‘given his schedule’’.
Criminal barrister Tony Bouchier said the decreasing payments might be because detectives aren’t forming the same relationships in the criminal underworld that they might have historically.
‘‘Paying informants is a very traditional aspect of policing, so that may be one reason,’’ Bouchier said.
He also mused that police investigation methods had become more advanced and therefore negated the need to pay informants as often.
‘‘Electronic eavesdropping, CCTV and covert surveillance have advanced a lot in recent years, so police are possibly able to target criminals in a more efficient way without needing to pay people for information.’’
Victoria University Criminology lecturer Dr Trevor Bradley said police might have simply realised that paying informants isn’t particularly effective.
‘‘British and North American research suggests the informant scheme generates a whole lot of ‘noise’, which is misleading and inaccurate information,’’ Bradley said.
‘‘That noise takes time to wade through and can be counter-productive for police, wasting time and resources.’’
Police Association president Chris Cahill said the majority of payments tended to go to ‘‘criminal human intelligence sources’’ who work in the area of drugs and organised crime.
‘‘That hasn’t been a focus of police in recent years, but 700 of the new 1800 police are designated for organised crime so I’d expect in years to come the number would rise again,’’
Cahill said.
The police informant scheme has a somewhat controversial past.
In 2014, Zariah Jae Samson bashed and strangled her boyfriend Cory James Protos to death in Christchurch and had her murder charge reduced to manslaughter because police needed to protect informants.
Protos’ appalled family said the ‘‘loophole’’ denied them justice.
An investigation found the police reduced the murder charge after being faced with a prolonged and unforeseen legal battle that could have jeopardised their confidential informants.
Stuff was granted limited access to the court file in 2017. It revealed a complex legal battle over the disclosure of information from informants who provided intelligence on the killing on a confidential basis.
Then in 2016, the Stuff Circuit team uncovered allegations from multiple sources that serial rapist Malcolm Rewa was an informant and that this could have played a part in why it took so long to catch him.
Detective Inspector John Mackie said releasing information about the informant scheme ‘‘would be likely to prejudice the maintenance of the law by arming criminals with information about our methodologies and how we work in this field’’.
‘‘Criminals would know more about the operating methods of police, and they would use this to reduce our capability to solve serious crime, which is not in the public interest,’’ Mackie said.
He also said providing any details relating to payments would create law enforcement risks ‘‘because criminals may be able to exploit any gaps in our capability’’.
Police were also unable to speculate on why payments may be decreasing, he said.