When a movie starring The Rock starts looking like a documentary, you know we’re beyond the pale.
The People’s Champion’s new movie, “Snitch,” released this weekend, has the Rock going undercover with the Drug Enforcement Administration to reduce a prison sentence for his son. He soon finds he can trust no one and gets caught between unscrupulous, violent drug dealers and unscrupulous, violent federal agents.
It’s a good enough excuse to watch The Rock punch people for an hour and a half, but it’s also disturbingly close to the truth.
The use of drug informants in this country is a totally unregulated activity, and it puts lives in danger every day.
In her recent article “The Throwaways,” which won a George Polk Award, New Yorker journalist Sarah Stillman investigated the use of young drug offenders as informants.
Under current legislation, there are essentially no restrictions on the use of informants; law enforcement officers can use anyone, ask them to do anything, promise them anything and then decide whether they want to keep their end of the bargain.
California is the only state in the union with a law specifically limiting the use of informants — it says informants must be older than 14 years old.
All this leads to is vulnerable people – children and teenagers, drug addicts and those with mental health issues, among others – being put in dangerous circumstances under the protection of people with zero accountability.
In an interview with DemocracyNow.org, Stillman told the story of Shelley Hilliard, a teenage transgender woman in Detroit who was caught smoking marijuana on a motel balcony.
Police told her to have her dealer return to the scene or she would be incarcerated, “which, you know, was particularly troubling for her as a transgender person, obviously the implicit threats of sexual violence for someone such as her,” Stillman said.
The next day, the police allegedly released the dealer and told him Hilliard’s name. She was later found smothered to death, her body mutilated and set on fire.
Now, I don’t think it was the police’s intention to have their informant murdered. Far from it.
But as this horrifying case shows, when there are no guidelines on how police must deal with informants and the people they inform on, it opens the door for negligence.
What needs to change is the attitude and behavior of police toward the people whose lives they control. I’m joking, of course — that will never happen.
Law enforcement has always been an incredibly fraternal and insular institution.
Specific legal controls must be put in place to regulate who can be used as an informant, how they must be treated and what they must be rewarded with for putting themselves in a life-threatening situation.
What’s the point in asking a teenager to rat on another mid-level drug dealer when another will just pop up in his or her place?
If you think I’m exaggerating, I’d urge you to read Stillman’s article. She details many more harrowing cases like Hilliard’s and shows how deep the legislative deficiencies go.
Most importantly, we must keep in mind that lives are at stake.
We’re conditioned to treat those inside the criminal justice system as nothing more than numbers, when these are real people whose relatively minor crimes have taken away control of their lives.
Gordon Brillon is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from Lincoln, RI.
