Police gave £450k to informants
WEST YORKSHIRE is the UK police force with the seventh highest spending on informants, a new analysis has revealed.
It paid out £451,759 to its Covert Human Intelligence Sources – commonly known as informants – in the five years from 2014/15.
The figure includes £110,249 spent in 2018/19, which was the highest expenditure by the force in any of the years examined. It means West Yorkshire was the UK force with the seventh highest expenditure overall and for 2018/19 alone, according to data provided by 27 forces to the University of Portsmouth’s journalism department.
The analysis found that police forces across the UK had spent at least £13.6m on informants over the last five years.
The highest amount paid out during that period was £4.36m by the Metropolitan Police, with Police Scotland, West Midlands, Thames Valley and Northumbria in the top five.
Former undercover policeman Neil Wood said that, in his experience, informants could be paid anything from £20 to £15,000 for information leading to successful arrests and around 90 per cent were used to investigate drug-related offences.
He is now chief executive of Law Enforcement Action Partnership, which is lobbying for drug policy reform, and has doubts about whether informants are effective in tackling drug dealing.
“If you arrest a drug dealer on the information of an informant, you remove a drug dealer,” he said. “All it does is create an opportunity for another drug dealer; crime doesn’t reduce.”
West Yorkshire Police declined to comment when it was asked about its expenditure and whether it considered the use of informants to be a cost-effective exercise.
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