Making Small Criminals Big (Video Update)

The problem for most people who would otherwise think an entrapment defense will save their sorry butts is that they are otherwise predisposed to commit the crime.  That makes small time criminals the perfect mark for the Bureau if Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which may not be able to investigate and find anyone actually committing a crime, but has become extremely good at making crimes happen.

Via Brad Heath at USA Today:

They were waiting for a phone call that would launch a daring and dangerous crime, sending them charging through the front door of a Mexican drug ring's stash house to steal 50 pounds or more of cocaine from three armed guards. Their plan was to disguise themselves as police officers, tie up the guards, and slip away with a half-million dollars worth of drugs. If tying them up didn't work, they'd kill them all.

Only the small army of federal agents watching them knew that it was all a lie.

There was no house. No drugs.

And the only things waiting for them when the call came were a team of camouflaged federal agents with rifles and stun grenades, and the promise of a long prison sentence for a plot to steal and re-sell non-existent cocaine.

So far, they rounded up more than 1000 would be winners of the criminal lottery this way, offering wildly profitable enticement to people who they've identified as potential bad dudes.  Maybe not violent. Maybe not big league. Maybe not of the sort that would ever consider taking down a big time stash house, but at least a naughty enough to take the enticement seriously and to squeak past entrapment.

(Updated to add in the video, now that it doesn't include advertising or autostart. Thanks, Brad.)

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the agency in charge of enforcing the nation's gun laws, has locked up more than 1,000 people by enticing them to rob drug stash houses that did not exist. The ploy has quietly become a key part of the ATF's crime-fighting arsenal, but also a controversial one: The stings are so aggressive and costly that some prosecutors have refused to allow them. They skirt the boundaries of entrapment, and in the past decade they have left at least seven suspects dead.

The ATF has more than quadrupled its use of such drug house operations since 2003, and officials say it intends to conduct even more as it seeks to lock up the "trigger pullers" who menace some of the most dangerous parts of inner-city America. Yet the vast scale of that effort has so far remained unknown outside the U.S. Justice Department.

Cool name, trigger pullers, and calculated to put an immediate end to any potential sympathy they might otherwise receive. After all, the ATF reasons, these aren't nice, clean kids who would never break the law otherwise, and when you call them killers, even if they've never harmed a fly in their erstwhile criminal career, you almost appreciate ATF going out and finding these trigger pullers before they find you.

In many cases, the records show the ATF accomplished precisely what it set out to do, arresting men outfitted with heavy weapons and body armor, and linked to repeated, and sometimes bloody, crimes. In the process, however, the agency also scooped up small-time drug dealers and even people with no criminal records at all, including Army Rangers. It has offered would-be robbers the chance to score millions of dollars of cocaine for a few hours of work. In at least one case, the ATF had to supply its supposed armed robbers with a gun.

So maybe calling them trigger pullers isn't quite right, but you can no doubt anticipate the rationale.

Former ATF supervisor David Chipman, who left the agency last year, said the public deserves to know more about how the ATF is using its resources. "There are huge benefits, and there are huge downsides," he said. "Do you want police to solve crimes, or do you want them to go out and prevent crimes that haven't occurred yet? What are the things you're willing to do so that your kid doesn't get shot?"

Do you really want to wait until one of these trigger pullers kills your little angel? No, you don't.  And neither does the ATF, which loves children too.

ATF officials reject the idea that they should focus only on people with violent records. "Are we supposed to wait for him to commit a (obscenity) murder before we start to target him as a bad guy?" said Charlie Smith, the head of ATF's Special Operations Division, which is responsible for approving each sting. "Are we going to sit back and say, well, this guy doesn't have a bad record? OK, so you know, throw him back out there, let him kill somebody, then when he gets a bad record, then we're going to put him in jail?"

And so what if the trigger puller has never so much as touched a trigger before, or did much pulling for that matter. It's not like the ATF could entice anyone to engage in their sting who wasn't otherwise included to violence, drugs and mayhem. It's not like they are dangling hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of dollars in front of them. Oh wait.

As it becomes more widely known what the ATF is doing, the dubious tactics are becoming less accepted.

Critics, among them federal judges, say the ATF's operations are flawed. In an opinion last year, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago dismissed the drug-house stings as a "disreputable tactic" that creates "an increased risk of entrapment because of the potential for the extensive use of inducements and unrealistic temptations to encourage the suspects' criminal conduct."

Not to mention seven targets died as a result of these stings.  But it's so much easier and more effective to create phony crimes to ensnare the bad (and semi-bad) guys than to have to go out on the street and do something about crimes that happen without the finger of the government pushing the button.

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