Massachusetts police have long wielded unchecked authority over confidential informants. But now there are calls to rein in that power in the wake of a Boston Globe Spotlight Team investigation that documented widespread misconduct.
The co-chair of a powerful legislative committee has vowed to push for greater accountability of the use of confidential informants.
At the same time, the state’s new police oversight commission is weighing statewide regulations that would govern police departments’ use of secret sources, spurred in part by Snitch City, the Globe’s investigative series and podcast.
“I was alarmed and shocked at the amount of abuse,” Senator Lydia Edwards, who co-chairs the Joint Committee on the Judiciary, said of the series. “I believe that there needs to be a systemic response.”
The Spotlight investigation found that detectives took advantage of the secrecy afforded to their informants in a range of troubling ways: cutting corners on obtaining search warrants; settling scores with drug dealers; and exploiting vulnerable, drug-addicted women for sex. The most recent installment of the series showed that prosecutors often enabled such misconduct by deferring to police even in the face of evidence that an officer is lying.
For the Judiciary Committee, Edwards is considering several possibilities, including holding legislative hearings, subpoenaing records, and demanding answers from district attorneys and police departments. There must be a way, she said, to require more transparency and accountability in how police handle their sources while maintaining the safety of confidential informants.
“All options are on the table,” said Edwards, who is an attorney and lawyer for the military.
In particular, the senator was troubled to learn Boston police had failed to investigate after one of its officers was accused in court of cutting and pasting allegations attributed to informants in search warrant applications in unrelated cases. The senator, a Democrat from East Boston, also questioned whether police had the legal authority to refuse to comply with judicial orders in cases involving informants — which Boston police have done in multiple cases.
As Edwards’s committee digs in, some accountability may be coming from another direction: the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, which has begun drafting standards that will be required of all state and local police agencies. In May, when the commission proposed regulations for how criminal investigations are conducted, it cited Snitch City among its list of consulted resources.
“We want to make sure that we address this,” Enrique Zuniga, executive director of what is known as the POST Commission, said in an interview last week.
Confidential informants, Zuniga said, are “a key tool in criminal investigations that everybody recognizes, but unfortunately with the potential for some real misconduct.
“That is concerning. Concerning to us, concerning to the public, and [concerning to] others.”
The POST Commission’s draft regulations start with the basics. To be certified, police departments would be required to adopt a policy governing the use of confidential informants, and then force officers to follow it.
Spotlight found that dozens of Massachusetts law enforcement agencies — including the police department in Brockton, one of the state’s largest cities — had no policy governing the use of informants. And many of the departments that had policies failed to adhere to their own rules.
That’s unacceptable, Zuniga said, adding that departments need to be prepared for more scrutiny. “You can expect that potentially you could get audited,” he said.
The POST Commission, which was created in 2020 amid the national outcry over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, initially focused on certifying Massachusetts’ nearly 21,000 police officers. So far, it has barred 75 former officers from future police work, including one whose disciplinary history included misconduct involving an informant.
Now, officials have turned to setting standards for the state’s 438 police agencies, which in coming years will be required to certify that they adhere to the commission’s regulations. Zuniga has been pushing the Legislature for additional funding, so that the POST Commission can begin sending staff to audit police departments and ensure compliance with the law.
The commission’s annual budget of $8.8 million was 7 percent less than what it had requested, a shortfall that prevented it from beginning that work, Zuniga said. The commission has reupped its request and hopes to launch the audit effort next year.
Another reform could involve modernization of record-keeping. Edwards expressed surprise and frustration that key Massachusetts court documents are still kept on paper and are not digitized, as they are in other states.
A months-long Spotlight Team analysis of more than 2,000 search warrant applications found an approval rate of 99.8 percent.
The effort was laborious, in part because the files, while public, are kept on paper at district courthouses rather than digitized.
Zuniga said he understands why police are protective of their sources, but he noted that absolute secrecy can also invite corruption.
“It has this flip side … a very real vulnerability in the whole system, which is something that can be misused or abused,” Zuniga said. “And it’s not hard to see how somebody who is unscrupulous could start abusing it.”
Andrew Ryan can be reached at andrew.ryan@globe.com or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at @andewryan.61