Police Use Newspaper Ads to Recruit Snitches

[Jim Finnel]

The Albuquerque Police Department has turned to the want ads for snitches.

An ad this week in the alternative newspaper The Alibi asks "people who hang out with crooks" to do part-time work for the police.

It reads in part: "Make some extra cash! Drug use and criminal record OK." [MSNBC]

Does this sound at all like something that’s going to make Albuquerque a better place? It’s absurd on its face, a completely sick feeding frenzy mentality that goes a long way towards explaining how we’ve become the world’s leading jailer. The very fact that police are actively seeking sketchy people to rat out other sketchy people shows you exactly how useless and cyclical much of our criminal law-enforcement activity has become.

Worse yet, this is exactly how you incentivize bad people to create bad situations. This is how innocent people’s addresses end up on drug warrants, only to have their doors smashed in, their dogs shot, and their peaceful lives forever tarnished by the long, infinitely clumsy arm of the law. This is how police become detached from morality, collaborating with criminals to create crime.

If there is such a thing as "sending the wrong message" in the war on drugs, it isn’t marijuana reform, it’s police offering people money to take drugs and commit crimes.



News Hawk: User: 420 MAGAZINE ® - Medical Marijuana Publication & Social Networking
Source: StoptheDrugWar.org
Copyright: 2008 StoptheDrugWar.org
Contact: drcnet@drcnet.org
Website: Police Use Newspaper Ads to Recruit Snitches | Stop the Drug War (DRCNet)

 

[hood1]

If you have numerous dea people and local drug enforcement teams that are graded on how man people they jail and how many lives ruined, it is a sick world we live in. These people feel they have the right to choose how we live our lives. Quit allowing our elected representatives to dictate to us how we should live our lives. Vote, sign petitions, send money to your favorite MJ reform group. Send Obama a message at his website let the majority be heard.

Give me liberty or give me death!

 

[wordsworm]

So... let me get this straight: Rat out drug users and dealers so you can buy your own drugs.

Sounds like communist China to me.

Just wanted to add: maybe they should offer c*c*aine and cr*ack to them instead. Surely that would be more effective.

 

[Keith Lake]

Rats in general have a conflict in interest; generally trying to save their own ass at the expense of others.

Recruited rats have a profit motive, which to me would call their credibility in additional question above and beyond their normally low credibility cause by being a member of the rat species.

Wonder how the data quality is going to be?

Not a proper function of goverment = trying to turn the citizens against one another