Interesting story about an officers inappropriate sexual relationship with an informant ("human source", "confidential informant", "covert human intelligence source")
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/01/26/sex-harassment-settlement-minnesota-bca-informant
As always in these cases it is good to ask a few pertinent questions about the management of confidential informants and hopefully the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is asking itself how this situation occurred.
- What are the agency rules and regulations about contact with informants and how are contacts reported?
- Was there only one officer managing this informant?
- What supervision was there and what went wrong with it?
- What training did the officers involved have for this highly specialised role?
- What changes can the agency make to reduce the chances of this happening again?
It is easy to cast all the blame on one "bad apple" but if one wants to eradicate this type of behaviour one needs a full independent audit of what went wrong and not one carried out by people with a vested interest in sweeping the issue under the rug.
Three things will help prevent this sort of event:
- Comprehensive policy and procedures for officers involved in managing informants
- Only trained officers involved to manage informants and those officers being properly trained.
- Good IT to record and manage all the records.
If you want to know more get in touch we provide audits and training. And we are significantly cheaper than $110,000!
