ABSTRACT
This chapter considers one of the central issues in intelligence-led policing. It attempts to describe the recruitment, cultivation, management, supervision, and control of criminal informants by the police in the context of the familiar relationship between formal legal rules, administrative guidelines, management processes, operational discretion, and the daily working practices of police officers. Most criminal informants are recruited while detained as suspects at police stations during the course of police investigations. Danger is an occupational hazard for nearly all criminal informants and the risks can include death or serious injury according to the kind of activity being informed upon. The criminal informant’s principal function is to provide intelligence about organized or recurrent crime rather than evidence capable of standing up in court. The central strategic management issue concerns how the intelligence potential of the criminal informant can be maximized. The ‘tasking’ of informants is as old as professional policing and was recently endorsed by the Audit Commission.
