Some people don’t learn . You just can’t make up informants. Here is a story from Smithfield, Rhode Island about a 600k lawsuit based on information from an informant .
In essence the officer obtained a warrant based on an informant who no one met. From the report:
U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy said there was a “strong” inference that police had indeed lied. She said Marcello’s affidavit for the warrant “was clearly false,” because when put under oath during a deposition, Marcello “denied having any personal contact with an informant,” the judge wrote. Further, wrote McElroy, “while Marcello (the officer) said he knew that his [department] supervisor, defendant Michael Smith, had been the one to actually talk to the informant because Smith told him that he met with the informant, that was not accurate either, as Smith also denied under oath having personal contact with the informant.” In fact, McElroy said there was no evidence anywhere “that anyone in the department had contact with the putative informant.”
I am not quite sure how the Chief justifies this dishonesty as he appears to do. Smithfield Police Chief Richard P. St. Sauveur Jr. said, “Joe Marcello is a hard-working, reliable, trustworthy and valuable member of the Smithfield Police Department. He continues to be assigned to the detective division as a detective sergeant.”
the defendant’s lawyer had a different view:“I don’t know how you can employ a police officer who has completely lied about an informant. How could you possibly ever trust him to provide accurate information and testify under oath?
Simply, if your agency does not have in place good structures to manage informants and the information from them this will happen.
Set up an effective system that manages the risks and train your officers properly. Do not tolerate dishonesty.
600k of tax payers money would have got you state of the art IT and trained officers properly and still had a lot left over.