Snitches redundant as technology advances
Payoffs budget drops as police investigation techniques become more sophisticated, writes
Police informants may have pocketed almost $2 million in the past eight years – but the annual payouts have plummeted to just a quarter of the amount in 2011-12.
Data obtained under the Official Information Act show police paid them a total of $1,948,845 between 2010 and 2018.
However, the sums have been decreasing year on year from $416,000 in 2011-12 to the lowestever 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, he criticised the police’s lack of disclosure when it came to informants and said it was not good enough.
Nash said he wondered if 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.
The Sunday Star-Times approached Nash for comment last week in his role as minister but his press secretary said he could not discuss it ‘‘given his schedule’’.
Criminal barrister Tony Bouchier, a former police officer, said the payments might be falling because detectives were not forming the same relationships in the criminal underworld as before.
He also speculated that electronic eavesdropping, CCTV and covert surveillance had become more advanced, negating the need to pay informants as often.
Victoria University Criminology lecturer Dr Trevor Bradley said police might have simply realised that paying informants was not 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.
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 controversial past.
In 2014, Zariah Jae Samson bashed and strangled her boyfriend, Cory James Protos, to death in Christchurch but her murder charge was reduced to manslaughter because police needed to protect informants.
Protos’ appalled family said the ‘‘loophole’’ denied them justice.
A Stuff 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.
Sunday Star-Times 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 arm criminals with insights into police strategies.
Police were also unable to speculate on why payments may be decreasing, he said.