Police coercing non-drug using citizens into working as drug snitches
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 6:27 pm | By: Radical Russ
(Buffalo News) Bianca Hervey, a 20-year-old college student, was returning home to her apartment in Attica when a village police officer drove up behind her, put on his flashing lights and pulled her over.
Hervey’s driver’s license, Officer Christopher Graham told her, had been suspended for failing to pay traffic tickets. He arrested her.
Graham handcuffed her, put her in the back of the police cruiser and took her to police headquarters. Her car was impounded and towed away.
At the police station, Graham handcuffed Hervey to a bench and told her she would probably spend the night in jail, Hervey said.
But then Graham offered her a way out of her problems.
Become a confidential informant for the Wyoming County Drug Task Force, he told her, and he could make the charges disappear.
Police departments throughout the country use people arrested on drug charges to inform on others. In return, their charges are reduced or dismissed.
But Hervey said she doesn’t use drugs and, having just moved from Batavia to the tiny village of Attica, doesn’t know anyone in Attica who does.
That didn’t stop her recruitment as a confidential informant.
Neither Wyoming County Sheriff Ferris Heimann, nor District Attorney Gerald Stout has a problem with how Smith’s department handled the case.
Asked about recruiting someone who said she is not part of the drug trade, Stout responded to The News: “But she agreed to do it.”
Nothing more aptly demonstrates the idiocy of prohibition than a system of law enforcement and justice that uses young people as bait. Surely nobody in the close-knit group of drug users in the tiny town of Attica, NY, is going to think twice about the new girl in town who is so desperate to buy a large amount of cocaine or pills or weed, but doesn’t seem to know which end of a joint to light.
This is even more shameful than the Rachel Hoffman case. At least Rachel was someone who hung around with a cannabis and ecstasy-using crowd. This Bianca Hervey sounds the majority of young people who, believe it or not, don’t do any drugs! When police infiltrate criminal organizations, they’ve had months of training, so why do they think they can take a young lady who doesn’t pay traffic tickets and turn her into supercop?
Topics: Attica, Bianca Hervey, confidential informants, New York, Rachel Hoffman, undercover
Would be a great time for her to purchase life insurance! Lots of it!
The bait usually dies.
Good one. Sad, but true.
well there’s a simple answer to that russ. If they’re successful they can brag about how well the war on drugs is going. If everything goes wrong then they can blame it on her, not have to pay out an insurance claim (like if a cop died), AND they can tout the dangers of drugs and gangs and receive bigger budgets.
besides why should have have to risk their own necks?