Last weekend the NYT Magazine published a long and engrossing piece by Ted Conover on the complicated life of Alex White, a longtime police informant in Atlanta. In a follow-up interview, Conover ponders the role of informants in society:
Does anyone ever have a good word to say about a snitch? I don’t think so. Disloyalty is something we love to hate. That said, it’s not simply a case of law enforcement tapping the world’s pre-existing complement of disloyal lowlifes. As with so many kinds of cooperation with the police, often there’s coercion: people snitch to get out of a legal bind. At least some, like Alex, then find a way to manage the immorality of it. They find ways to live with themselves. For Alex, living with himself meant drawing a circle around close friends that was inviolate; beyond that were the "nobodies," who didn’t matter.
White played an unwilling role in a police coverup of the fatal shooting of an innocent elderly woman. When White was later caught selling marijuana, his sentence was similar to what the cops convicted in the shooting received. Balko fumes:
White was convicted of selling "a couple ounces" of marijuana to an undercover police officer in an Atlanta suburb. His sentence? Up to eight years in prison. The police officers who pressured an informant for a tip with threats of false drug charges, lied on a search warrant, gunned down a 93-year-old woman, left her to bleed on her own living room floor while planting drugs in her basement to cover up their mistake, then conspired to cover it all up by pressuring and threatening another informant to lie for them? They were sentenced to 5, 6, and 10 years, respectively.
Update: this post has been tweaked. The original phrasing may have implied that Mr. White was partially responsible for the death of the woman; he was not.
The Dish 