Is Metro creating crime in order to fight it in hard-luck areas?
That's the word from the Clark County public defenders office, where the caseload is filled with defendants claiming cops entrapped them.
For several years, police have been posing as vagrants (mainly in Downtown) and hanging $20 bills from their pockets to entice muggers—a practice OK'd by the county district attorneys office. Metro trumpets it for purging chronic offenders. Now the 3-year-old practice is under fire by county defense attorneys, who say the bait-switch-and-arrest tactic is legally spurious and targets the poor.
"Look at the areas where they're doing this—Fremont Street, Las Vegas Boulevard and Bonanza, Martin Luther King and Bonanza. It's not done in prosperous areas or in casinos where there are purse snatchings," Deputy Public Defender Dianne Dickson says.
Mostly, the program's succeeded in nabbing the doltish, not the dastardly, Dickson argues. It busies defense attorneys with cases like the down-and-outer snookered by a cop disguised as a drunk painter. The decoy slogged around with a can of brew and fake citation dangling from his pocket to give the appearance he was a perpetual troublemaker, all while a Cops crew filmed the staged drama—and the mentally ill Samaritan who warned the decoy about homeless cleansing Downtown, then lifted the money. Two judges dismissed the case, citing entrapment.
"I guess it's a big deal for Metro ... they managed to catch a poor, retarded guy for stealing," Dickson says. Arrestees are generally charged with larceny from a person or robbery. "From what I understand, the DA's office doesn't try to plead or negotiate on these cases," further bogging down a woefully understaffed office—one incessantly reamed by legal watchdogs for not taking enough cases to trial and porous defense of indigents.
Where the public defenders see entrapment, Lt. Pat Charoen of the Downtown Area Command sees proactive police work. They see more work. He sees a safer community. Charoen has a layered defense of decoying: The bottom level is that Metro and the DA's office caucused to create and execute a legally defensibile initiative. The middle layer is that crime rates decreased (numbers weren't immediately available), and the top is the removal of a number of serial violators. The icing: several convictions and prison terms.
But Charoen reminds us that he's biased.
"When you talk to the DA's office, they're going to be biased toward prosecution, when you talk to the public defenders' office, they're going to be biased toward their clients," he says, "so consider your sources."
District Attorney David Roger couldn't be reached for comment on this story.
The entire entrapment concept troubles University of Kansas professor and national psychology and law expert Lawrence Wrightsman. He questions "the implication of someone being guilty because of his temptations ... that whole doctrine has a lot of problems to it."
States, he says, have muddled seemingly unambiguous federal rules on the issue: "Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person's mind the imposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the government may prosecute." And, "Where the government has induced an individual to break the law and the defense of entrapment is at issue ... the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was disposed to commit the criminal act prior to first being approached by government agents."
Some states put onus on the suspect to prove they were induced to commit a crime, and often disregard entrapment arguments in cases involving habitual criminals. Others focus on the intent of cops: How many times they prodded people to commit a crime. It's application by interpretation, and who's right depends on who's doing the interpreting.
In some cases, cops left no doubt as to who the scofflaws were. In a Utah case, an officer who had a sexual relationship with a suspect asked her to get some drugs, then arrested her when she did. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court found entrapment in a case where a cop told a drunk defendant to move his vehicle and then charged the person with operating under the influence. There've also been cases nationwide where police repeatedly induced someone to break the law until, under pressure, the person did so. Wrightsman would prefer that cops need the equivalent of probable cause before they could tempt people.
"I have a lot of concerns about the danger that you do create crimes by the kinds of things police are doing," he says. "I'm not really bothered by police posing as prostitutes and arresting johns—those guys (johns) ought to know what they are getting into. There are a lot of computer sting operations where feds pose at teenage girls on the Internet. Again, those guys ought to know what they are getting into.
"In crime-laden areas, it's a little stickier," he continues. "There a still a lot of innocent people in high-crime areas. Police sting operations happen all the time in those areas. Most of the people they arrest are probably crime-prone, but there are some innocent people caught in the mix."
Grant Stitt resides on the other side of the philosophical fence. Chairman of UNR's criminal justice department, he's a self-preservation ideologue. Nobody has the right to steal from anyone, period. And using decoys isn't entrapment, "since putting an idea into the mind of an offender to commit a crime and presenting the opportunity to do so" isn't the same as openly encouraging thievery. "I don't care if the money is hanging out of their pockets or taped to the back of their coats, it's not entrapment," says Stitt, who's written extensively on entrapment.
Other than a badge, gun, and, oh, the legal right to play judge, jury and executioner if warranted, Stitt says, an undercover cop is just like you and me.
"A decoy is the same as a street person, homeless person or a tourist," he says. "The police are doing the kinds of things that normal people would do, they just happen to be law-enforcement officers, and they're probably doing it in a high-crime area (and) trying to reduce crime. What's wrong with that?"
Plenty, as Dickson sees it. The issue could open a legal can of worms, to say nothing of its effect on how outsiders view Metro. The decoy-deploy is sapping already-strained police resources—Metro only got funding last month for 100 of the 300-plus personnel it requested; Dickson says voters might be inclined to shoot down Metro's ballot-box push for more money.
"Three cops pose as decoys and there are dozens of cops ready to arrest people," she says. "Metro's crying about needing more cops, yet they're wasting a dozen cops at a time by manufacturing crimes."