Maintaining control of an informant is of major concern to law enforcement administrators and the criminal justice system. What are some considerations that control officers need to keep in mind in order to maintain control of informants and to avoid the

Question

issue of entrapment?

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The control of informants is best achieved through frequent personal contacts with them. These interactions are the best method for debriefing informers and maintaining rapport with them. The officer assigned should make most, if not all, contacts with informants. Doing so reduces additional demands of the informant and ensures the person's allegiance to the control officer.
Another critical area of instruction for the informant is entrapment. Criminal suspects must be given an "opportunity" for the commission of a crime and not the "motivation" for doing so. If the entrapment issue is not remembered during the course of an investigation, the case may result in the dismissal of charges against the suspect and a soiled reputation for the department. The investigator should be careful not to pay for information that has not been verified or that is not considered useful in the investigation. Accordingly, informant payments should be sufficiently modest as to avoid defense accusations of entrapment. If relatively large payments for information or "work" are made to an informant, the defense will maintain that the investigator's payment to the informant was so high that the informant was enticed into "setting up" the suspect solely for the monetary reward.