Police often apprehend criminals through deception or sting tactics. To hasten compliance to laws, police utilize their knowledge of crime to construct circumstances that invite criminals to commit more crime in a recordable way, enhancing the likelihood of apprehension of criminals who otherwise would be difficult to detect and prosecute (Crank 2004).
Stings typically employ enforcement officers, cooperative community members, and apprehended offenders to play a role as a criminal partner or potential victim in order to gather evidence of a suspect’s wrongdoing. Stings are conducted by local, state, and federal enforcement agencies. Sometimes agencies operate stings independently, and other stings are mutual efforts consisting of many agencies, including agencies of other nations.
Stings vary in the scope of their operations and techniques, suggesting numerous variations, yet their objectives are similar: Attract and build a case toward identification, apprehension, and conviction of offenders who often go undetected through traditional police initiatives. One way to examine stings is to review federal and local police sting experiences, components of a legal sting, and the perspectives of sting critics.
Federal Stings
Federal enforcement agencies conduct local, national, and international stings. Federal stings are conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (HS), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Publicized stings often include terrorism and arms smuggling, child pornography and pedophile activities, bank laundering of illegal funds, and cigarette and drug trafficking.
Terrorism and arms smuggling stings are typified by a New Jersey case. A suspect was charged with the crimes of providing material support for terrorism and smuggling firearms (IGLA-2 surface-to-air missile) into the country (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003). The buyers were FBI agents pretending to be a terrorist cell, the sellers were undercover Russian enforcement agents, and the apprehended broker was a British citizen (BBC News 2003).
National stings (that is, operations Ar-tus, Avalanche, Candyman, Blue Orchid, Hamlet, and Rip Cord) and international stings (operations Ore, Snowball, and Twins) have detected and apprehended porno-graphers and pedophiles (Weiss 2003). For example, Operation Candyman uncovered an estimated seven thousand subscribers linked to a pornographer’s website. Those arrested included day care workers, clergy members, law enforcement personnel, and military personnel. Operation Rip Cord identified more than fifteen hundred child pornographer suspects who also solicited child sex through websites in several countries (CNN 1997). An investigator was so disgusted by the materials he viewed that he ripped a computer plug from the wall, giving the sting its name. Operation Twins, the global Internet investigation into a pedophile ring known as ”the Brotherhood,” was led by the United Kingdom’s National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the police forces of Norway and Germany.
Stings have been conducted by individual federal agencies in other nations, such as Operation Casablanca. Three large Mexican banks were charged by the DEA with laundering millions of dollars from Mexican and Colombian drug cartels (Zinser 1998). The successful sting was called a national insult by the Mexican government because they were never informed of its operation.
Smuggled cigarettes (both counterfeit and genuine) represent a federal tax revenue loss and potential health risk and many smugglers are linked to terrorists (Demetriou and Silke 2003). ICE, ATF, and U.S. Customs conduct stings to apprehend cigarette smugglers.
To control drug trafficking, FBI agents posed as cocaine traffickers in Arizona, resulting in the capture of sixteen American soldiers and law enforcement personnel (Sherman 2005). Those arrested had received an estimated $220,000 in bribes and were responsible for more than 1,230 pounds of cocaine smuggled into the country.
Finally, in this regard, two celebrated stings historically provided future sting experience: Abscam and DeLorean. Abscam was a political scandal in 1980 that led to the arrest of members of the U.S. Congress for accepting bribes for favors from Middle Eastern sheiks who were actually FBI personnel (Lescaze 1980). Some convictions were overturned resulting from entrapment. John Z. DeLorean, a man People Weekly described as ”the Auto Prince,” was arrested for buying a hundred kilos of cocaine in 1982 (Eighties Club 2000). DeLorean testified that his intention was to salvage his company.
Local Police Stings
Local police stings include but are not limited to fencing (purchase) of stolen goods, covert cameras designed to detect traffic speeders, prostitution and drug stings, and those targeted to detect alcohol, cigarette, and illegal firearm ammunition sales to youths.
Theft stings are typified by antifence operations, whereby police pretend to fence stolen property and transact business with criminals such as in Birmingham, Alabama (Langworthy 1989). A storefront operation was established to attract and detect auto thieves. However, auto thefts increased by 4.46 cars per day during its operation and decreased to previous levels after the sting.
The Texas commissioner of alcoholic beverages promoted youth stings (Garza 2005). Texas officials reported that stings were an excellent means of combating problems of the unlawful purchase and consumption of alcoholic beverages among minors. Youth stings gain credibility and community support among police departments. Another alcohol sting employed underage police cadets to purchase packaged beer at retail stores in Denver (Preusser, Williams, and Weinstein 1994). Cadets purchased beer 59% of the time, and subsequent stings resulted in beer purchases between 32% and 26% of the time.
Stings include covert cameras (speed cameras that are hidden from view) designed to detect speeders (Reinhardt-Rutland 2001). For instance, nine automated cameras designed to detect speeders traveling ten miles faster than the posted speed limit produced $12 million annually for Cincinnati (Sickmiller 2005).
Baltimore launched the Youth Ammunition Initiative in 2002 (Lewin et al. 2005). The initiative addressed gun violence by targeting illegal firearm ammunition sales. Businesses and public agencies supplied undercover investigators. By interrupting the flow of ammunition, youth violence was reduced.
Prostitution stings include female officers posing as prostitutes. Because of a lack of a complainant, prostitution is often seen as a ”victimless” crime; therefore, police must initiate investigations on their own (Walker and Katz 2005,245). An example is typified by the Waco (Texas) Police Department (Waco PD), which reported that prostitutes are carriers of sexually transmitted infections or the HIV virus (Waco PD 2004). A typical prostitution sting in Waco can produce twenty-five arrests among prostitution customers, or johns. After a customer is arrested, his picture graces a website. The Metropolitan Police (Metro PD) in Nashville, Tennessee, post the names of customers on their website (Metro PD 2004), and their stings typically result in forty to forty-five arrests.
Drug stings are common among enforcement agencies. Often several agencies combine resources and information. For instance, multicounty drug task units and state agency participation are characteristic of many efforts, especially in rural areas. For example, the Sheriff’s Anti-Crime/Narcotics (SAC/Narc) unit includes deputies from Whiteside County and the Illinois State Police (Lewis 2005). One sting recovered ten pounds of marijuana, eighteen doses of heroin, and ten Endocet pills and resulted in four seized vehicles. SAC/NARC identified about 750 drug county outlets and see stings as the most productive strategy towards detection.
What Is a Legal Sting?
Law enforcement is allowed to engage in deceit, pretence, and trickery to determine whether an individual has a predisposition to commit a crime, and they can provide an opportunity for an individual to commit that crime, all without being guilty of entrapment. Guidelines for determining entrapment were established in Sorrells v. United States (1932), which set the precedent for taking a ”subjective” view of entrapment. That is, police cannot provoke an act from an innocent person. Defendants have the right to challenge evidence and can invoke the defense that they would not have broken the law if not tricked into doing it, or entrapment, which can lead to dismissal of the charges (Clarke 2003). For example, a Nebraska farmer was indicted for receiving child pornography through the mail after agents spent twenty-six months offering him pornography.
In Jacobson v. United States (1992), prosecutors failed to show that a defendant had been ”predisposed, independent of the government’s acts and beyond a reasonable doubt, to violate the law,” Justice Byron White wrote (see Supreme Court Decisions). That is, a suspect’s tendency to commit a specific crime must have existed prior to enforcement attention.
The sting controversy mandated the Los Angeles Police Department to develop and initiate a plan for organizing and executing regular, targeted, and random integrity audit checks, or ”sting” operations, to identify and investigate officers engaging in at-risk behavior, including unlawful stops, searches, seizures (including false arrests), uses of excessive force, or violations of the department’s codes (U.S. District Court 2001).
Stings enhance police power despite Jacobson. For instance, in United States v. Jimenez Recio (2003), the court ruled that the contraband seizure of drugs does not end the probe into conspirators and that a sting can be launched to trip up criminals without breaking the law.
Sting Issues
In San Diego County, 138 tobacco retailers paid an annual licensing fee for police stings and the salary of a code enforcement officer who issued and renewed licenses. Those caught selling tobacco to minors faced penalties ranging from $100 to $500 and could lose their license. A licensee argued that because only one of eighteen merchants sold illegal products to minors, funds to enforce codes should be refunded and tobacco licenses should cost less.
Also, a reasonable expectation of privacy exists even in a sting sex case (that is, whether a particular place is isolated enough that a reasonable person would see no significant risk of being discovered) (Kiritsy 2005). The Massachusetts State Police settled a charge on behalf of a gay man who alleged that troopers harassed him at a highway rest stop. The settlement included state police guidelines preventing officers from deliberately trudging into wooded areas near rest stops.
Operation Lightning Strike, an FBI sting aimed at trapping NASA personnel and its contractors, included an agent who pretended to have developed a (phony) device. Millions were spent on luxury hotel suites, gourmet meals, deep-sea fishing trips, and strip clubs. Agents had few suspects but Strike was a scenario similar to dozens of alleged failed stings uncovered by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Moushey 1999).
Sting Debate
Stings are often justified because of the detrimental effects certain violations have upon quality-of-life issues. This thought is consistent with the broken-windows precept: Eliminating minor disorder deters serious crime because of the social influence that order exerts on the disorderly and on law-abiding people (Kelling and Wilson 1982). Breaking any law, no matter how trivial, should end with an arrest in order to maintain order (Bratton and Knobler 1998).
Yet, both scholars and courts recognize that law on the topics is not ”what law is” (Gould and Mastrofski 2004). That is, policy and practice associated with sting tactics are distinctively different. For instance, high rates of unconstitutional police searches are documented in the literature (Gould and Mastrofski 2004). Researchers found that an estimated 30% of police searches (115 searches) conducted by officers in a department ranked in the top 20% nationwide had violated Fourth Amendment prohibitions on searches and seizures. The majority of the unconstitutional searches, thirty-one out of thirty-four, were invisible to the courts, having resulted in no arrest, charge, or citation. If general searches produce civil rights violations, then it is an easy throw to argue that since the centerpiece of sting tactics is deception, stings can produce similar, if not greater, civil rights violations. The thought paints a troubling picture of police practices and raises a number of difficult questions about discretionary police practices.
Based on this argument, sting tactics tend to increase criminal victimization and citizen dissatisfaction, while fear of crime and residents’ perceptions of disorder remain unaffected (Harcourt 2004). This perspective reveals stings as counter to respectable behavior because they promote and reward liars, deception, concealment, and betrayal, Klockars (1991, 258) clarifies, by implying that ”the more successful police are in appearing really bad, the more successful they must be in appearing good.”
Also, since enforcement employs deception to detect and record criminal activities, when they testify against offenders in the courtroom, ”where the stakes—their jobs, the case” are much higher, will officers deceive a jury (Crank 2004, 303)? Other critics argue that the price for more freedom is likely to be less order and the price for more order is likely to be less freedom (Langworthy and Travis 2003). However, two thoughts remain: (1) Stings tend to be covert tactics, and all of their working components tend to be less publicized, as are their failures, and (2) crime has been on the decline for some time, and stings are practiced by many police agencies. Thus, tentative inferences can be endorsed.
