Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (2014) s13e06 Episode Script
Police Stings
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight"!
I'm John Oliver. Thank you so much for
joining us. It has been a busy week.
March Madness got underway,
Markwayne Mullin cleared the first
hurdle to become head of DHS,
and of course,
the conflict in Iran continued.
Now,
despite relentless bombing,
the U.S. has been unable to stop Iran
striking targets around the region
and blocking the Strait of Hormuz.
The news hasn't been great.
So, on Thursday,
Secretary Pete Hegseth decided to
speak to the American public directly.
I stand here today speaking to you,
the American people,
not through filters,
not through reporters,
not through cable news spin.
There are reporters in front of me,
but they are not our audience today.
It's you, the good, decent,
patriotic American people.
You, the hardworking, taxpaying,
God-fearing American patriots.
Okay, set aside
Hegseth's whole vibe there,
which is very, "Welcome to my birthday
dinner, one of you has been poisoned",
you actually don't need to announce
who you are and aren't speaking to.
There's a reason I don't start
this show by saying,
"Welcome!
Fuck this studio audience."
"I wish they'd jump
into the Hudson River."
"If they don't laugh, that's on them.
Anyway, it's been a busy week!"
I might think it,
but I'd never say it!
Hegseth seemed particularly frustrated
at the press pointing out parallels
between this conflict and the wars
America's been stuck in in the past.
This is not those wars.
President Trump knows better.
Epic Fury is different.
It's laser focused, it's decisive.
To the patriotic members of the press,
nobody can deliver
perfection in wartime.
This building knows that more than
anyone, but report the reality.
We're winning decisively
and on our terms.
"Epic Fury is different"?
Maybe.
It's definitely the stupidest name
I've ever heard.
It sounds like a VHS tape Hegseth put
out of himself doing karate in a garage.
It sounds like the name
of an energy drink
marketed to divorced monster truck
fans containing so much caffeine
it makes you shit your pants
while having a heart attack.
It doesn't exactly
convey care and precision.
But at the risk of not being
a "patriotic member of the press",
a lot of things do seem
to be going pretty poorly,
from strikes on Iran's oil facilities
causing toxic black rain,
endangering the public there,
to the continued blockage
of the Strait of Hormuz,
which is causing
skyrocketing gas prices.
And while polls suggest that Trump's
base is sticking with him so far,
there are already signs
of some cracks there,
given the response of this woman
interviewed at a gas pump.
If you could say something
to President Trump
and he was going to hear you
right now, what would it be?
And you voted for him
how many times?
Three times. That was my bad.
Apparently, I'm an idiot.
I mean, not no.
You know what they say:
fool me once, shame on you,
fool me twice, shame on me,
fool me three times,
there's gonna be a blockade
in the Strait of Hormuz
and my road trip to St. Louis is about
to cost more than my car payment.
As for where things go
from here, who knows?
Thousands of Marines have
been sent to the region,
possibly
to secure Iran's Kharg Island.
Which most people would consider
"putting boots on the ground."
However, Republican Pete Sessions
is not most people.
The island is not, in my opinion,
How so? It is a territory.
It is Iran.
I'm not gonna argue that point.
Matter of fact, you're right.
But I would say is, the president's
chosen not to obliterate
the ability to get oil.
And I think
he wants to go secure that
to make sure the Iranians
don't do themself in.
So, I think it's probably wisdom.
Is that boots on the ground?
No, not like inside Iran
where they're in the cities.
Wait, so it's not boots on the ground
because they're not in a city?
What the fuck are you talking about?
That clearly counts!
The phrase isn't "boots in the city",
mainly because I'm guessing
that's already the title of an all-cat
reboot of "Sex and the City"
starring Puss in Boots.
The point is, Trump seems
desperate to paint this situation
as much more stable
than it actually is,
and on Friday, he essentially
just declared victory.
I think we've won. We've knocked
out their navy, their air force.
We've knocked out their anti-aircraft.
We've knocked out everything.
We're roaming free,
from a military standpoint.
All they're doing
is clogging up the strait,
but from a military standpoint,
they're finished.
That's great news! But here
is the problem with that.
He already declared that we'd won
the war 11 days ago.
I don't know if you've noticed, but it
has seemed to continue since then.
For all this administration's
disdain for "cable news spin"
and its insistence
that people "report the reality",
they are stretching the truth
to breaking point here.
Because even as Trump's
claiming that we've won,
the Pentagon's requesting 200 billion
in extra funding for this operation,
sure suggesting it's gonna be
going on for a while.
He's also claimed we've destroyed
100% of Iran's military capability,
which is a little hard to believe,
given they're still somehow managing
to strike multiple other
countries in the region,
and he claimed twice this week
that a former president
endorsed his decision to go to war,
something they've all since denied.
The lies are getting pretty flagrant,
even by this president's standards,
and inevitably, people are noticing.
You could argue that the only
irrefutably "laser focused, decisive"
epic fury that has been
on display this week
has been this outburst
targeted at him.
Again, not no.
And now, this.
And Now:
As Always, People on Local TV
Cannot Be Trusted
with St. Patrick's Day.
It is so great to have you here,
chef.
Thank you for having me.
How are y'all today?
Great, thank you and
Happy St. Patrick's Day to you.
- Happy St. Patrick's Day to y'all.
- Top of the mornin'.
May the luck of the Irish be
with you. 6:53, good morning.
Top of the mornin' to y'all.
Top of the mornin' to all of ya.
Top of the mornin' to ya.
Top of the mornin' to ya! I don't
know if that came out Irish enough.
Jane, top of the morning to ya.
Top o' the morning, right?
Top of the mornin' to ya.
Happy St. Patrick's Day.
I like that. That was good.
Top of mornin' to ya.
I can't do Irish.
Top of mornin' to ya, Christina.
It's a beautiful mornin' out there.
And we're definitely feeling
like I should stop doing that accent.
Top of the mornin' to ya!
- You gotta give it more oomph.
- I'm not Irish.
Maybe Chip has some Irish in him.
Let's send it over to Chip.
Maybe he can do the Irish jig.
I have an Irish jig,
I can do an Irish jig.
But, no, my lineage comes
from England,
so we'd be the persecutors,
I guess, in that situation.
Liam,
who's your favorite Irish person?
- I don't know.
- What an unhinged thing to say.
- You don't like any Irish people?
- That's not what I said.
- You can't think of anybody you like.
- I'm not, no.
Moving on. Our main story tonight
concerns undercover policing.
It's not just a staple of
movies and TV shows,
it's something cops do in real life,
too, to catch people suspected
of breaking laws both big and
small, as this woman discovered.
Karen Haigh plans to fight the 230
dollars ticket she got on Halloween Day,
accused with dozens of other
drivers of not stopping
to let a 6'4" Donald Duck
cross the street.
Then they just told me that I was
getting a ticket
because I didn't stop
for a pedestrian.
And it was a crazy, it was
a duck, it was a huge duck.
It was scary.
I'm a woman. It scared me.
It's true, a cop dressed up
as Donald Duck
and then ticketed people
who didn't stop to let him cross.
And I get why she kept driving
there, ducks are terrifying.
As we've covered before,
all ducks, Donald included,
have a corkscrew penis.
This isn't the first time
that we've used this graphic,
and it will not be the last.
And incidentally, Disney, this
guy hits public domain in 2030,
and things
are gonna get interesting then.
That is one of many instances where
cops have set up so-called "stings".
In the past four decades,
sting operations of all types
have become a major part
of law enforcement in the U.S.
There are stings targeting
drug dealing, sex work, terrorism,
tax fraud, drunk driving,
poaching, and a host of other crimes,
including, as you've just seen,
failure to yield to a gigantic duck.
And on some level, you know that
cops like running sting operations,
given just how often
they appear on local news.
Drivers for the online ride
service Uber
targeted
in an L.A. sting operation.
Dozens of people have been indicted
in a criminal sting operation
called Operation Hush.
A four-month major
sting operation ends
with a Butler County man facing
felony drug charges.
Investigators set up
a sting operation
orchestrating a purchase
with the suspected drug traffickers.
The amount of fentanyl seized,
and hear this,
could kill the entire population
of Louisville several times over.
Is that anchor okay?
Cops say there was enough fentanyl
to annihilate this godforsaken town,
leaving behind nothing but a desert
of crow-pecked bones
future generations will only
refer to as "The Shadow Place".
Up next, we'll take you
inside Louisville's new aquarium,
which, and hear this,
contains enough water to drown
us all several times over.
But while stings are often celebrated
as triumphs on the news,
when you start digging into them,
the details can quickly
become questionable at best.
Take that Uber sting. The way
operations like those work is,
an undercover officer
flags down an Uber,
maybe says they don't have
the app, or that their phone is dead,
and offers to pay cash for
a ride to their destination.
The trap being, ride-share drivers
are subject to arrest
if a ride isn't prearranged.
But that seems like
a pretty shitty thing to do,
given drivers may have been
bending the rules to help someone
who was telling them
they were in need.
And that makes it kind of satisfying
to watch this video
shot by someone
caught in a similar sting,
who then went back to the same
location to warn other drivers.
Brother, those people are undercover
cops. I just got a citation for this.
- Really?
- Yeah, they trapped me.
Yep. Good job, guys.
I'll see y'all in court.
I thought your phone was dead.
Your phone
ain't dead no more, huh?
Excellent!
Everything about that is great.
From the speed at which the driver pulls
away when he hears the word "cops",
to the cop's clear disappointment,
to the glee of the guy taunting them.
I honestly haven't been this delighted
to see a cop on camera
since that Boston big boy
zooted out of the slide.
It's still so good!
It will never not be good.
If I die with a smile on my face,
you'll know that
that was the last thing I saw.
Call that video Paul Rudd,
'cause it never gets old.
But if it seems like the cops
in that sting
weren't so much stopping crime as
creating it, that's sort of the point.
It's honestly the case with more of
these operations than you might think.
So given all that, tonight,
let's look at stings:
why police love them, how they use
them and who is paying the price.
And let's start with how
they became so popular.
Stings really took off in the 1970s,
as police shifted
from primarily reacting to crime,
to trying to prevent it.
That shift coincided with a string
of Supreme Court decisions
that expanded protection for defendants
against coercive police tactics,
with things like the establishment
of Miranda rights.
As one expert noted, "As the police
use of coercion has been restricted,"
"their use of deception
has increased."
The first large-scale sting
operation began in 1975.
And in it, D.C. police created
a fake mafia-run fencing operation
to lure people into selling them
stolen property.
And officers really got
into their roles,
giving themselves, quote-unquote,
"Italian names"
like "Angelo Lasagna"
and "Rico Rigatone".
Here is a photo of them.
It is a picture that screams,
"The only Italian word
I know is 'lasagna.'"
They even padded out their
backstory with lines like,
"We gotta stiff in the trunk,
whadda we do?"
to which Rico Rigatone would
reply, "Tossa him in the freeze."
They also offered targets meatballs,
telling them, and I quote,
"You'll hurt Pasqaule's feeling
if you no have a meatball."
Ultimately, they wrapped up
the sting
by inviting everyone who'd sold
goods to them to a giant party
where a police sergeant
played "Don Corleone"
and had attendees kiss his ring as
he told them they were under arrest,
all while one agent sang,
"When the moon hits
your eye like a big pizza pie",
as he put handcuffs on them.
And wow!
Dassa lotta stereotype-a!
But that sting
was viewed as such a success,
the federal government started
giving local police money to emulate it
and departments around the country
began doing their own versions.
And the appeal of stings
was obvious.
As this news report
from 1979 explains,
catching people on tape
makes for very easy prosecutions.
Around the country,
officials have had great success
in court with sting evidence.
In Memphis, all but eight of the
1,500 sting defendants pleaded guilty,
and every one of those
who chose a trial was convicted
when the jury saw the tapes.
Right. And that does
make sense, doesn't it?
Once you have someone on tape,
it is usually pretty much game over,
with one notable exception.
And police have sometimes
gotten way too into
the "playing dress-up" part of stings.
In Baton Rouge, in the '90s,
some cops wore blackface
in a sting operation,
bragging to local reporters,
"Not only do they not know we're
cops, they don't even know we're white!"
And first of all, yes they did.
No one in the history of blackface
has ever pulled it off.
And also, you just cannot
convince me that a white cop
could speak for more than 20 seconds
without identifying himself
as both white and a cop.
And the thing is, as stings
became more common,
courts have been reluctant
to set limits on what police
are allowed to do in them.
As one analysis puts it,
"There are no clear legal limitations
on the length of the operation,"
"the intimacy of the relationships
formed, the degree of deception used,"
"the degree of temptation offered
and the number of times it is offered."
All of which leaves the government with
a "nearly limitless ability to deceive."
And some law enforcement will take
that as an opportunity
to rack up easy arrests
and make some headlines.
Take Sheriff Grady Judd in Florida.
His department's constantly boasting
about running online stings,
often fishing for arrests
concerning sex offenses,
with flashy names like Cyber
Guardian, Naughty Not Nice II
and Child Protector II,
which sound less like police operations
and more like Steven Seagal movies.
And while you'd hope
they targeted predators
looking to engage
in criminal activity,
when a local station dug
into the tactics Judd was using,
they found
that wasn't exactly the case.
You think you know how
these stings go down.
Cops post an ad for an underage teen,
wait for predators to respond,
then arrest them
when they show up in person.
If I had Grady's world,
they'd all go to prison.
But what so many of our local law
enforcement leaders are not telling you
is that they've had to try harder
and harder over the years
to trick men into showing up.
10 Investigates has learned,
through court documents
and arrest reports,
that law enforcement is now reaching
out themselves to young men
who did nothing more than post
an ad on a traditional dating site.
Cops form a rapport, then switch
their age and try to trick
the sometimes hesitant men
to keep on talking.
They had me call them.
I sat on the phone for an hour
with a grown woman who was talking
to me in a very seductive manner.
He was 22 when he had his first
and only run-in with the law.
He thought he was talking
to a 26-year-old online
who even sent this photo,
wedding ring and all,
but after baiting him in,
she switched her age from 26 to 13.
Joseph thought she had
to have been kidding,
so he took her up
on her offer to meet.
I walked into a house and
was thrown into handcuffs.
He's serving
two years of house arrest,
then the equivalent
of a life sentence,
since he's now labeled
a sexual offender.
But that really doesn't feel like
a slam dunk for justice there, does it?
He posted an ad online looking
for an adult, then talked to an adult,
on an adult site, and then
got understandably confused
when that adult suddenly
reverse-Bigged themselves,
especially given he'd
already been sent this photo,
which is obviously
of a grown woman.
Wedding ring aside,
she's got the face of someone
who knows what a Roth IRA is.
But while the crimes in these
operations can be made up,
the punishments can be very real.
And not just when it comes
to sex stings.
The ATF, for years, did
so-called "stash house" stings,
where basically,
undercover agents would recruit
a group of people to rob a nonexistent
stash house full of drugs,
with the promise
of huge amounts of money.
Over the years, they arrested
over 1,000 people
in these sorts of stings,
like these men,
who walked right into the trap.
Stun grenades startled three young
men near Chicago as police move in.
They thought they were going
to rob a drug stash house.
Instead, they got busted.
A fake scenario
set up by the ATF to get hardened
criminals off the street.
Yeah, they lured a bunch of people
into a car under false pretenses
and then sprang
a nasty surprise on them.
It's almost as bad as accidentally
hailing the Cash Cab.
Under no circumstances,
by the way. Do you hear me?
The only way I'm being
transported in that thing
is if you kill me
and stuff me in the trunk.
And while police will claim
stings like those catch people who'd
commit violent crimes anyway,
I'm not so sure about that.
Reporters looked into that case,
and found that this guy
not only had no convictions for
violent offenses,
he clearly didn't know
what he was doing.
USA Today found this small-time
criminal in this case
showed up with a rusty gun
and bullets that didn't fit.
His punishment:
looking at 25 years in jail.
Yeah, apparently,
that gun was so old
"it had been made sometime
before World War I."
And a rusty old gun
with bullets that don't fit
clearly shouldn't justify sending
a man to prison for 25 years.
At best, it should be the comic
relief character in a Pixar movie
where a bunch of talking guns
learn the value of found family.
Judges may not have a lot of room
for leniency in cases like that,
thanks to mandatory
minimum sentencing laws,
which trigger based on
the severity of the crime.
And because the ATF's making
the crime up in the first place,
they can make sure it meets
mandatory minimums
by inventing drug amounts that
trigger long sentences,
or pressuring targets into doing
things that increase the penalty.
In one sting out of Wichita,
ATF agents suggested a felon
take a shotgun, saw it off,
and bring it back to them,
even providing
instructions on how to do it.
That sawed-off gun allowed them to
charge him with a more serious crime.
And if you're thinking, "Well,
hold on, isn't all this entrapment?"
You would think so,
but it turns out,
the legal bar for proving
entrapment is incredibly high.
One big reason is that, in court,
prosecutors simply have to show
you're doing something you'd have
been "predisposed" to do anyway,
and depending on your case,
things like prior convictions
and drug addiction
could qualify.
Often, all they have to show is that
you were willing to commit the crime.
But a key reason people
can be willing to do that
is because they've just been
offered a lot of money.
All of which makes it feel pretty
predatory that these stings
can actively target low-income
communities.
In California, a federal judge
even accused ATF agents
of "trolling poor
neighborhoods for suspects."
Investigations have also found stings
disproportionately target minorities.
One that looked at seven years
of stash house stings
in the greater Chicago area found
that, of the people charged in them,
92% were Black or Hispanic.
And when a retired ATF
agent was asked to explain
why they chose certain areas,
his answer wasn't great.
Why do a stash house investigation
in Englewood,
as opposed to some other place?
We don't. We do them anywhere
that we find that there's people
that are willing to participate
in that level of violence,
those are people we're going
to want to talk to.
Again, this is a kill or be killed
proposition.
It doesn't matter if you're in
Englewood, the West Side,
Detroit, New Orleans, anywhere.
Any community where
we can find those violent people,
then we'll provide them
with this opportunity.
What a fascinating, off-the-top-of
your-head list that was.
Englewood, the West Side, Detroit
or New Orleans.
All-fun fact-majority Black areas.
He's only one step away
from adding Wakanda
to that list.
And disproportionate targeting
has been baked into stings
from the very beginning.
Remember the fake mafia guys
buying fenced goods?
It rounded up about 120 people,
although "most were not
experienced traffickers,"
"but unemployed Black men who had
heard about the high prices"
"being offered at the warehouse and had
decided to steal something."
Flash forward to 2018, and law
enforcement in Chicago
were using a "bait truck"
that they filled with Nike sneakers
and parked in an impoverished
neighborhood,
something that justifiably infuriated
community members.
Instead of y'all chasing crime,
you're trying to create crime.
On this YouTube video posted by
anti-crime activist Charles McKenzie,
outraged residents
call that entrapment.
- Y'all baiting our young kids.
- It's a bait truck, man.
Y'all parked an empty Nike truck.
This is bogus, and y'all shouldn't
be entrapping Black people.
It's real crimes being committed.
Why do you gotta do this?
Why don't you go and preach
to somebody else, huh?
Put this in your neighborhood!
Yeah, fair point.
And I know it's a little hard to tell
what that cop
dropped on the ground there,
but from context, I'm gonna
just guess it's his dignity.
But it is not just racial
or economic targeting,
stings can also sweep up people
who might be easier for cops
to manipulate,
due to mental illness
or disabilities.
Just listen to these parents of
an autistic teenager in California
tell the story of how
some happy news from school
quickly took
a turn for the worse.
He told me that he met
a new friend in art class
and I was
completely amazed by that.
It seemed like they were having
these great conversations
or what seemed typical
for a teenager,
because there was such a furious
amount of texting going on.
But those texts weren't just
friendly teenage banter.
Instead, their son's new friend was
pressuring him to buy marijuana,
and this new friend
wasn't just a teenager,
he was an undercover cop who went
by the name of Daniel Briggs.
It took the Snodgrasses' son
three weeks to buy half a joint
of pot off a homeless man.
A few weeks later, armed policemen
walked into his classroom
and arrested him
in front of his peers.
22 students were arrested
in the drug sting.
Most of them
were special needs students.
That is appalling.
And for what it's worth,
their son only got the joint
because his cop friend told him
"he was always in trouble
with his strict mom"
and was super stressed,
that's why he really needed it.
So, it seems that cop was truly
living by Mr. Rogers' famous advice:
"Look for the helpers, so you can
arrest them for weed possession."
In a sign of just how much the media
uncritically laps these stories up,
this is how those arrests
got covered on the local news.
Riverside County sheriff's deputies
have smashed an illegal drug ring
operating out of three
high schools in Temecula.
22 students were
taken into custody.
It was like "21 Jump Street."
Deputies say, during the investigation,
they seized all types of drugs:
meth, cocaine,
LSD and ecstasy.
Chaparral High School also had students
escorted by police off campus.
This picture shows one
of five arrests made there.
That kid on the screen there
was the one who spent weeks
trying to buy
half a joint for his friend
because he was worried about him.
But I can see why the news
didn't lead with that angle.
"Cops Bust Massive Drug
Ring" is a much cooler story
than "Cops Manipulate-slash-
Arrest Autistic Teen."
And it goes way beyond
school drug busts.
An investigation
into another ATF practice,
of setting up fake stores to buy drugs
and guns,
found them repeatedly manipulating
people with disabilities.
In one case, agents set up
a fake smoke shop in Portland
and paid a 19-year-old
who was mentally disabled,
and his friend, to promote their
store by, and this is true,
getting a large tattoo on their necks
of the fake shop's emblem,
which was a giant squid
smoking a joint.
Which is utterly despicable.
And when a judge later reprimanded
the government lawyer for that,
I'd argue she did it
in far too casual a manner.
It was government money that
was used to pay for the tattoos?
I believe so.
Could you send a message back
ATF.
It's really a bad idea.
Nothing unlawful about it,
but not a good idea.
"Not a good idea"?
Look, there is a time to be polite,
but "finding out agents
just used taxpayer money"
"to tattoo a teen with mental
disabilities" is not it.
I looked up that exact situation in
Emily Post's book of etiquette,
and her advice just says, "Fuck those
fuckers sideways with a rusty fork."
I didn't say that. Emily Post did.
So, you know it's official.
And if it wasn't enough for cops to
prey on disabled or desperate people,
there is one more way they can make
things easy on themselves with stings
and that is by using
"confidential informants," or CIs,
basically, people they convince
to go undercover on their behalf,
sometimes by paying them,
but often by taking people
they've already arrested
and pressuring them to work
as CIs to obtain their freedom.
As this ex-cop readily explains,
using these sources
can really speed things up
when it comes to making a case.
If you had not been able, personally,
to use confidential informants,
would you have been as effective?
Nowhere near as effective.
- I know I would not.
I may have to watch a house for days
or weeks to establish probable cause.
My informant goes in
and makes a buy out of it
and I have my probable cause
in five minutes.
Look, I will concede,
that man in particular is going to have
a hard time going undercover.
Because if you showed me that guy
and gave me three guesses
what he does for a living,
they'd be, in order: cop,
cop, and guy
who plays cop in porn.
And the appeal for police
in CIs is obvious:
they're people who may already be
known and trusted in their community.
And, crucially, as civilians,
they're subject to even fewer rules
and restrictions than cops regarding
conduct during an investigation.
But there are
some obvious issues here.
First, because CIs can be paid,
or working under the threat
of jail time,
they can be under huge pressure
to produce whatever info cops need,
whether it is reliable or not,
meaning they might well
fabricate information.
Also, cops can look the other way
at crimes their CIs have committed
or even continue to commit
while they're working for them.
And finally, if you're thinking
pressuring untrained civilians
into doing the job of undercover
cops feels like it could end badly,
you're right about that.
There've been multiple stories of CIs
being assaulted or murdered
in the course of working
for the police.
As this expert points out, there are
a whole host of issues CIs raise,
but the limited nature of disclosure
on these operations
means we don't know
the full extent of any of them.
There is no law enforcement
entity or official in this country
that knows how many
informants there are,
how many crimes they solve,
and how many crimes are tolerated
by law enforcement,
by the informants that they run.
Exactly. And it is probably
not a great sign
that we have less information
about confidential informants
than we do about how
many toilets Meghan Trainor
and her Spy Kid husband have.
And it's not just information
I don't think I was actually clear
about that, they have two.
They have two toilets right next
to each other so they can piss,
and presumably shit together,
without breaking eye contact.
That is from their old house.
They've since moved,
and are opting for a, quote,
"knees to knees" setup.
Yeah, I don't like knowing
this about them either!
But at least
we're on the same page now.
Anyway, it's not just information
on confidential informants,
public data on stings in general
is extremely limited,
partly because they're usually not
subject to public disclosure laws.
And that, mixed with a near
limitless ability for cops
to target anyone they want,
is a truly dangerous combination.
And if you want to see everything that
we've discussed tonight in one place,
just look at counterterrorism stings.
After 9/11, the FBI went hard
in trying to preemptively stop
the next big terror attack.
One hallmark of this involved stings
targeted at Muslim communities.
And these cases resulted
in a lot of convictions.
A survey two years ago found that,
out of 992 terrorism
defendants since 9/11,
just three have been acquitted
and four have seen their charges
dropped or dismissed,
giving the Justice Department a
near-perfect record of conviction
when it comes to terrorism cases.
But that same report also found
that the majority of defendants
had no direct connection to terrorist
organizations at all,
and over a third had been
caught up in FBI stings.
And some of those
were incredibly dicey,
like the case of these four men
in Newburgh, New York,
who the FBI claimed planned to
attack synagogues and an airport.
And at the time, they trumpeted
the arrests as a huge deal.
We have breaking news. The FBI
says it has thwarted a terror plot.
Federal investigators say
the suspects are four men with
a shared hatred for America.
According to the FBI, the four men
intended to carry out their plan today.
The good news here
is that our FBI and our NYPD
did a very, very good job.
The fact that we've been able
to penetrate these groups early on,
they were being monitored
for close to a year.
This is truly a textbook example
of how a major investigation
should be conducted.
That sounds
pretty impressive, doesn't it?
But you should know, while
"friend of the Baileys" Chuck Schumer
was bragging that the FBI was able
to penetrate the group very early on,
the reason for that is,
they're the ones
who put the group together
in the first place.
The entire plan
was concocted by the FBI.
So, I guess it really was textbook,
if the textbook was called
"How to Solve Crimes When
You're the One Doing Them."
The truth is, none of the four
men arrested were militants.
They were, however,
impoverished individuals,
one of whom
had severe mental health issues.
They were recruited by
an informant,
who'd promised them huge financial
inducements to carry out the plot,
including 250.000 dollars,
free holidays, and expensive cars.
And that informant then
did everything for the men,
from getting the missile
and bombs
to teaching them
the tenets of radical Islam.
One of their attorneys actually
summed up the whole situation
pretty succinctly.
The government conceded at trial
that these four defendants
never had a plan,
never had done this before, had
no technology ability to do this,
had no access
to these kind of weapons,
had no access to the money
to make these kind of bombs,
had no access to terrorists
to come up with the ideas,
had no access to anything,
even cars.
These four defendants
were no more capable
of firing a Stinger missile
Tony the Tiger could make a bomb
from a Frosted Flakes box.
Yeah, that is both infuriating
and completely true,
right up to his claim
about Tony the Tiger.
I know this isn't the point.
Tony is a fictional character.
Therefore, in his world,
he is capable of anything,
including bomb-making.
Now, do I believe
the good folks at Kellogg
would put a bomb-maker
on their cereal box? No.
But could Tony conceptually build
a bomb in the universe he inhabits?
Of course he could.
And by that logic,
you could make the case that he was
actually more equipped to do terrorism
than these people the FBI
railroaded for no fucking reason!
Ultimately, the men were sentenced
in 2011
to a mandatory minimum
of 25 years in prison.
Although, three years ago,
the judge in their case granted a
motion for compassionate release,
calling their conduct heinous,
but acknowledging,
"The real lead conspirator
was the United States,"
which, depressingly, is pretty much
modern world history in a sentence.
And you can see just how tempting
it is for law enforcement to do this,
especially whenever there is
a panic about a certain population.
More recently,
it has been immigrants.
You may remember when Trump
and the media were freaking out
about that video
that supposedly proved
Tren de Aragua gangs were taking
over Colorado apartment complexes.
It was undeniably
a frightening image.
And in the wake of that, the ATF ran
a sting operation in that town,
with undercover agents offering large
sums to Venezuelan immigrants
to procure them guns and drugs.
And last summer, DOJ officials
called a press conference
to proudly show off the results.
In a matter of minutes,
we learned this was
far more than a news conference
about arrests, drugs, and guns.
The 10-month undercover
operation produced 30 arrests,
including three
described as TDA leaders,
along with five other
alleged TDA members,
the others labeled as actively involved
in TDA criminal activity.
TDA has brought its terrorism
to the United States.
TDA is real, it is dangerous,
and we have made prosecuting TDA
a priority in the district of Colorado.
Okay, so, there is
a lot to unpack there,
from the elaborate work that went
into their massive gun diorama,
to what is in those baggies,
because it looks to me
like Pink Panther jizz.
But the thing is, as one
reporter's since put it,
the results of that sting in court
have failed to back up the hype.
Because filings suggest
most of the people charged
weren't actually gang members
at all,
but a loose collection of impoverished
and desperate immigrants
drawn in by offers of cash.
In fact, when it comes to those
firearms, it's worth knowing,
many of the drugs and guns weren't
in the defendants' possession
before the government got involved.
The feds basically dangled money in
front of a bunch of desperate people,
said, "Go get us guns,"
and they did it.
And all that really proves is that,
for enough money,
you can basically
get people to do anything.
Which, not for nothing, was,
I believe,
also the official slogan of
the Riyadh Comedy Festival.
The point here is,
the long history of police stings
has far too often left us with a bunch
of fake crimes
from manufactured criminals resulting
in very real punishments.
And look, I am not saying
the crimes you've seen people
arrested for tonight don't happen.
Of course they do.
People do sell drugs in schools,
traffic guns, plan terror
attacks, and molest children.
And those crimes
should be investigated.
The problem with stings is,
they're an easy way for police
to rack up arrests and sell illusion
that they're addressing these crimes,
even when that
may not actually be the case.
Remember that county in Florida,
where Grady Judd loves
to hold press conferences
about his online sex stings?
It's currently being sued
by this woman,
who came to them at age 12
because she'd been sexually abused
by her adoptive father for years.
The investigation by Judd's department
was an absolute disgrace.
The detective who handled her case
failed to collect key evidence,
and, as her supervisor later wrote,
conducted an interview of the girl
using "inappropriate
questions and statements."
Judd's department
ultimately wound up charging the girl
with "giving false information
to a law enforcement officer",
for which
she was placed on probation,
and also made to write
these letters of apology
to both her abuser
and the sheriff's office.
It was only
after she was abused again,
during which she had the presence
of mind to take photos and video
of the incident on her phone,
that her abuser was finally arrested
and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Which is clearly infuriating.
She basically had to do that
department's work for them.
And it makes you think that
maybe Grady Judd's office
would've been a little better
at protecting an actual child
if they weren't spending all day
pretending to be one online.
Now, Judd never responded
to us when we asked him about this,
but apparently
I still have to tell you
that they've called that woman's
lawsuit "frivolous" and "baseless".
And I don't know, man.
When you've made a literal child
write a letter of apology
to her rapist,
I wouldn't be throwing
the word "frivolous" around.
I might just shut the fuck up about
everything for the rest of my life.
But I guess reasonable people
can agree to disagree there.
And when you put all this together,
it's hard not to conclude
that stings might actually be
doing more harm than good.
So, what do we do?
Well, I would argue,
at the very least, cops should be
doing much less of them,
and ideally, none of the stings
where the goal is basically,
"find anybody for anything."
As one expert put it,
if we're gonna do stings,
they should be "narrowly focused
on individuals"
"who law enforcement have credible
evidence may be planning"
"to commit a serious or violent
crime imminently,"
"or who have already done so and
are planning to do so again."
Which seems right to me.
Because as it stands,
police seem utterly addicted
to stings,
even though,
for what it's worth,
making up imaginary crimes
and arresting people for them
isn't law enforcement,
it is theater.
The one reform that might actually
be within all our control right now
is to try and remember that we
are all the audience for that theater.
So, if you are serving on a jury,
or work in the media,
or you see a story on TV
about a sting operation,
it's worth questioning what role
law enforcement played
in creating the crime
that they just supposedly stopped.
Honestly, we first started looking
at this story a few years ago,
and it has changed
how I've viewed
every sting story
that's made headlines since.
Remember when that group of men
were arrested
for trying
to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer?
Guess how many confidential informants
seemed to help that plot along?
I'll give you a clue: it is a
lot more than you would like!
You don't have to sympathize with
these men or agree with their views
to wonder if that plan could've
even gotten off the ground
if there hadn't been as many as a dozen
confidential informants involved
and two undercover federal agents.
The point here is,
cops have been getting away with
bullshit stings for far too long,
and we just cannot
let this slide anymore.
In fact, there's really
only one type of cops sliding
that I am completely
on board with,
and I think we all know
what it is.
Fuck you, Paul Thomas Anderson.
That is the best picture
of any goddamn year right there.
That is our show, thanks for watching.
We'll see you next week, good night!
I'm John Oliver. Thank you so much for
joining us. It has been a busy week.
March Madness got underway,
Markwayne Mullin cleared the first
hurdle to become head of DHS,
and of course,
the conflict in Iran continued.
Now,
despite relentless bombing,
the U.S. has been unable to stop Iran
striking targets around the region
and blocking the Strait of Hormuz.
The news hasn't been great.
So, on Thursday,
Secretary Pete Hegseth decided to
speak to the American public directly.
I stand here today speaking to you,
the American people,
not through filters,
not through reporters,
not through cable news spin.
There are reporters in front of me,
but they are not our audience today.
It's you, the good, decent,
patriotic American people.
You, the hardworking, taxpaying,
God-fearing American patriots.
Okay, set aside
Hegseth's whole vibe there,
which is very, "Welcome to my birthday
dinner, one of you has been poisoned",
you actually don't need to announce
who you are and aren't speaking to.
There's a reason I don't start
this show by saying,
"Welcome!
Fuck this studio audience."
"I wish they'd jump
into the Hudson River."
"If they don't laugh, that's on them.
Anyway, it's been a busy week!"
I might think it,
but I'd never say it!
Hegseth seemed particularly frustrated
at the press pointing out parallels
between this conflict and the wars
America's been stuck in in the past.
This is not those wars.
President Trump knows better.
Epic Fury is different.
It's laser focused, it's decisive.
To the patriotic members of the press,
nobody can deliver
perfection in wartime.
This building knows that more than
anyone, but report the reality.
We're winning decisively
and on our terms.
"Epic Fury is different"?
Maybe.
It's definitely the stupidest name
I've ever heard.
It sounds like a VHS tape Hegseth put
out of himself doing karate in a garage.
It sounds like the name
of an energy drink
marketed to divorced monster truck
fans containing so much caffeine
it makes you shit your pants
while having a heart attack.
It doesn't exactly
convey care and precision.
But at the risk of not being
a "patriotic member of the press",
a lot of things do seem
to be going pretty poorly,
from strikes on Iran's oil facilities
causing toxic black rain,
endangering the public there,
to the continued blockage
of the Strait of Hormuz,
which is causing
skyrocketing gas prices.
And while polls suggest that Trump's
base is sticking with him so far,
there are already signs
of some cracks there,
given the response of this woman
interviewed at a gas pump.
If you could say something
to President Trump
and he was going to hear you
right now, what would it be?
And you voted for him
how many times?
Three times. That was my bad.
Apparently, I'm an idiot.
I mean, not no.
You know what they say:
fool me once, shame on you,
fool me twice, shame on me,
fool me three times,
there's gonna be a blockade
in the Strait of Hormuz
and my road trip to St. Louis is about
to cost more than my car payment.
As for where things go
from here, who knows?
Thousands of Marines have
been sent to the region,
possibly
to secure Iran's Kharg Island.
Which most people would consider
"putting boots on the ground."
However, Republican Pete Sessions
is not most people.
The island is not, in my opinion,
How so? It is a territory.
It is Iran.
I'm not gonna argue that point.
Matter of fact, you're right.
But I would say is, the president's
chosen not to obliterate
the ability to get oil.
And I think
he wants to go secure that
to make sure the Iranians
don't do themself in.
So, I think it's probably wisdom.
Is that boots on the ground?
No, not like inside Iran
where they're in the cities.
Wait, so it's not boots on the ground
because they're not in a city?
What the fuck are you talking about?
That clearly counts!
The phrase isn't "boots in the city",
mainly because I'm guessing
that's already the title of an all-cat
reboot of "Sex and the City"
starring Puss in Boots.
The point is, Trump seems
desperate to paint this situation
as much more stable
than it actually is,
and on Friday, he essentially
just declared victory.
I think we've won. We've knocked
out their navy, their air force.
We've knocked out their anti-aircraft.
We've knocked out everything.
We're roaming free,
from a military standpoint.
All they're doing
is clogging up the strait,
but from a military standpoint,
they're finished.
That's great news! But here
is the problem with that.
He already declared that we'd won
the war 11 days ago.
I don't know if you've noticed, but it
has seemed to continue since then.
For all this administration's
disdain for "cable news spin"
and its insistence
that people "report the reality",
they are stretching the truth
to breaking point here.
Because even as Trump's
claiming that we've won,
the Pentagon's requesting 200 billion
in extra funding for this operation,
sure suggesting it's gonna be
going on for a while.
He's also claimed we've destroyed
100% of Iran's military capability,
which is a little hard to believe,
given they're still somehow managing
to strike multiple other
countries in the region,
and he claimed twice this week
that a former president
endorsed his decision to go to war,
something they've all since denied.
The lies are getting pretty flagrant,
even by this president's standards,
and inevitably, people are noticing.
You could argue that the only
irrefutably "laser focused, decisive"
epic fury that has been
on display this week
has been this outburst
targeted at him.
Again, not no.
And now, this.
And Now:
As Always, People on Local TV
Cannot Be Trusted
with St. Patrick's Day.
It is so great to have you here,
chef.
Thank you for having me.
How are y'all today?
Great, thank you and
Happy St. Patrick's Day to you.
- Happy St. Patrick's Day to y'all.
- Top of the mornin'.
May the luck of the Irish be
with you. 6:53, good morning.
Top of the mornin' to y'all.
Top of the mornin' to all of ya.
Top of the mornin' to ya.
Top of the mornin' to ya! I don't
know if that came out Irish enough.
Jane, top of the morning to ya.
Top o' the morning, right?
Top of the mornin' to ya.
Happy St. Patrick's Day.
I like that. That was good.
Top of mornin' to ya.
I can't do Irish.
Top of mornin' to ya, Christina.
It's a beautiful mornin' out there.
And we're definitely feeling
like I should stop doing that accent.
Top of the mornin' to ya!
- You gotta give it more oomph.
- I'm not Irish.
Maybe Chip has some Irish in him.
Let's send it over to Chip.
Maybe he can do the Irish jig.
I have an Irish jig,
I can do an Irish jig.
But, no, my lineage comes
from England,
so we'd be the persecutors,
I guess, in that situation.
Liam,
who's your favorite Irish person?
- I don't know.
- What an unhinged thing to say.
- You don't like any Irish people?
- That's not what I said.
- You can't think of anybody you like.
- I'm not, no.
Moving on. Our main story tonight
concerns undercover policing.
It's not just a staple of
movies and TV shows,
it's something cops do in real life,
too, to catch people suspected
of breaking laws both big and
small, as this woman discovered.
Karen Haigh plans to fight the 230
dollars ticket she got on Halloween Day,
accused with dozens of other
drivers of not stopping
to let a 6'4" Donald Duck
cross the street.
Then they just told me that I was
getting a ticket
because I didn't stop
for a pedestrian.
And it was a crazy, it was
a duck, it was a huge duck.
It was scary.
I'm a woman. It scared me.
It's true, a cop dressed up
as Donald Duck
and then ticketed people
who didn't stop to let him cross.
And I get why she kept driving
there, ducks are terrifying.
As we've covered before,
all ducks, Donald included,
have a corkscrew penis.
This isn't the first time
that we've used this graphic,
and it will not be the last.
And incidentally, Disney, this
guy hits public domain in 2030,
and things
are gonna get interesting then.
That is one of many instances where
cops have set up so-called "stings".
In the past four decades,
sting operations of all types
have become a major part
of law enforcement in the U.S.
There are stings targeting
drug dealing, sex work, terrorism,
tax fraud, drunk driving,
poaching, and a host of other crimes,
including, as you've just seen,
failure to yield to a gigantic duck.
And on some level, you know that
cops like running sting operations,
given just how often
they appear on local news.
Drivers for the online ride
service Uber
targeted
in an L.A. sting operation.
Dozens of people have been indicted
in a criminal sting operation
called Operation Hush.
A four-month major
sting operation ends
with a Butler County man facing
felony drug charges.
Investigators set up
a sting operation
orchestrating a purchase
with the suspected drug traffickers.
The amount of fentanyl seized,
and hear this,
could kill the entire population
of Louisville several times over.
Is that anchor okay?
Cops say there was enough fentanyl
to annihilate this godforsaken town,
leaving behind nothing but a desert
of crow-pecked bones
future generations will only
refer to as "The Shadow Place".
Up next, we'll take you
inside Louisville's new aquarium,
which, and hear this,
contains enough water to drown
us all several times over.
But while stings are often celebrated
as triumphs on the news,
when you start digging into them,
the details can quickly
become questionable at best.
Take that Uber sting. The way
operations like those work is,
an undercover officer
flags down an Uber,
maybe says they don't have
the app, or that their phone is dead,
and offers to pay cash for
a ride to their destination.
The trap being, ride-share drivers
are subject to arrest
if a ride isn't prearranged.
But that seems like
a pretty shitty thing to do,
given drivers may have been
bending the rules to help someone
who was telling them
they were in need.
And that makes it kind of satisfying
to watch this video
shot by someone
caught in a similar sting,
who then went back to the same
location to warn other drivers.
Brother, those people are undercover
cops. I just got a citation for this.
- Really?
- Yeah, they trapped me.
Yep. Good job, guys.
I'll see y'all in court.
I thought your phone was dead.
Your phone
ain't dead no more, huh?
Excellent!
Everything about that is great.
From the speed at which the driver pulls
away when he hears the word "cops",
to the cop's clear disappointment,
to the glee of the guy taunting them.
I honestly haven't been this delighted
to see a cop on camera
since that Boston big boy
zooted out of the slide.
It's still so good!
It will never not be good.
If I die with a smile on my face,
you'll know that
that was the last thing I saw.
Call that video Paul Rudd,
'cause it never gets old.
But if it seems like the cops
in that sting
weren't so much stopping crime as
creating it, that's sort of the point.
It's honestly the case with more of
these operations than you might think.
So given all that, tonight,
let's look at stings:
why police love them, how they use
them and who is paying the price.
And let's start with how
they became so popular.
Stings really took off in the 1970s,
as police shifted
from primarily reacting to crime,
to trying to prevent it.
That shift coincided with a string
of Supreme Court decisions
that expanded protection for defendants
against coercive police tactics,
with things like the establishment
of Miranda rights.
As one expert noted, "As the police
use of coercion has been restricted,"
"their use of deception
has increased."
The first large-scale sting
operation began in 1975.
And in it, D.C. police created
a fake mafia-run fencing operation
to lure people into selling them
stolen property.
And officers really got
into their roles,
giving themselves, quote-unquote,
"Italian names"
like "Angelo Lasagna"
and "Rico Rigatone".
Here is a photo of them.
It is a picture that screams,
"The only Italian word
I know is 'lasagna.'"
They even padded out their
backstory with lines like,
"We gotta stiff in the trunk,
whadda we do?"
to which Rico Rigatone would
reply, "Tossa him in the freeze."
They also offered targets meatballs,
telling them, and I quote,
"You'll hurt Pasqaule's feeling
if you no have a meatball."
Ultimately, they wrapped up
the sting
by inviting everyone who'd sold
goods to them to a giant party
where a police sergeant
played "Don Corleone"
and had attendees kiss his ring as
he told them they were under arrest,
all while one agent sang,
"When the moon hits
your eye like a big pizza pie",
as he put handcuffs on them.
And wow!
Dassa lotta stereotype-a!
But that sting
was viewed as such a success,
the federal government started
giving local police money to emulate it
and departments around the country
began doing their own versions.
And the appeal of stings
was obvious.
As this news report
from 1979 explains,
catching people on tape
makes for very easy prosecutions.
Around the country,
officials have had great success
in court with sting evidence.
In Memphis, all but eight of the
1,500 sting defendants pleaded guilty,
and every one of those
who chose a trial was convicted
when the jury saw the tapes.
Right. And that does
make sense, doesn't it?
Once you have someone on tape,
it is usually pretty much game over,
with one notable exception.
And police have sometimes
gotten way too into
the "playing dress-up" part of stings.
In Baton Rouge, in the '90s,
some cops wore blackface
in a sting operation,
bragging to local reporters,
"Not only do they not know we're
cops, they don't even know we're white!"
And first of all, yes they did.
No one in the history of blackface
has ever pulled it off.
And also, you just cannot
convince me that a white cop
could speak for more than 20 seconds
without identifying himself
as both white and a cop.
And the thing is, as stings
became more common,
courts have been reluctant
to set limits on what police
are allowed to do in them.
As one analysis puts it,
"There are no clear legal limitations
on the length of the operation,"
"the intimacy of the relationships
formed, the degree of deception used,"
"the degree of temptation offered
and the number of times it is offered."
All of which leaves the government with
a "nearly limitless ability to deceive."
And some law enforcement will take
that as an opportunity
to rack up easy arrests
and make some headlines.
Take Sheriff Grady Judd in Florida.
His department's constantly boasting
about running online stings,
often fishing for arrests
concerning sex offenses,
with flashy names like Cyber
Guardian, Naughty Not Nice II
and Child Protector II,
which sound less like police operations
and more like Steven Seagal movies.
And while you'd hope
they targeted predators
looking to engage
in criminal activity,
when a local station dug
into the tactics Judd was using,
they found
that wasn't exactly the case.
You think you know how
these stings go down.
Cops post an ad for an underage teen,
wait for predators to respond,
then arrest them
when they show up in person.
If I had Grady's world,
they'd all go to prison.
But what so many of our local law
enforcement leaders are not telling you
is that they've had to try harder
and harder over the years
to trick men into showing up.
10 Investigates has learned,
through court documents
and arrest reports,
that law enforcement is now reaching
out themselves to young men
who did nothing more than post
an ad on a traditional dating site.
Cops form a rapport, then switch
their age and try to trick
the sometimes hesitant men
to keep on talking.
They had me call them.
I sat on the phone for an hour
with a grown woman who was talking
to me in a very seductive manner.
He was 22 when he had his first
and only run-in with the law.
He thought he was talking
to a 26-year-old online
who even sent this photo,
wedding ring and all,
but after baiting him in,
she switched her age from 26 to 13.
Joseph thought she had
to have been kidding,
so he took her up
on her offer to meet.
I walked into a house and
was thrown into handcuffs.
He's serving
two years of house arrest,
then the equivalent
of a life sentence,
since he's now labeled
a sexual offender.
But that really doesn't feel like
a slam dunk for justice there, does it?
He posted an ad online looking
for an adult, then talked to an adult,
on an adult site, and then
got understandably confused
when that adult suddenly
reverse-Bigged themselves,
especially given he'd
already been sent this photo,
which is obviously
of a grown woman.
Wedding ring aside,
she's got the face of someone
who knows what a Roth IRA is.
But while the crimes in these
operations can be made up,
the punishments can be very real.
And not just when it comes
to sex stings.
The ATF, for years, did
so-called "stash house" stings,
where basically,
undercover agents would recruit
a group of people to rob a nonexistent
stash house full of drugs,
with the promise
of huge amounts of money.
Over the years, they arrested
over 1,000 people
in these sorts of stings,
like these men,
who walked right into the trap.
Stun grenades startled three young
men near Chicago as police move in.
They thought they were going
to rob a drug stash house.
Instead, they got busted.
A fake scenario
set up by the ATF to get hardened
criminals off the street.
Yeah, they lured a bunch of people
into a car under false pretenses
and then sprang
a nasty surprise on them.
It's almost as bad as accidentally
hailing the Cash Cab.
Under no circumstances,
by the way. Do you hear me?
The only way I'm being
transported in that thing
is if you kill me
and stuff me in the trunk.
And while police will claim
stings like those catch people who'd
commit violent crimes anyway,
I'm not so sure about that.
Reporters looked into that case,
and found that this guy
not only had no convictions for
violent offenses,
he clearly didn't know
what he was doing.
USA Today found this small-time
criminal in this case
showed up with a rusty gun
and bullets that didn't fit.
His punishment:
looking at 25 years in jail.
Yeah, apparently,
that gun was so old
"it had been made sometime
before World War I."
And a rusty old gun
with bullets that don't fit
clearly shouldn't justify sending
a man to prison for 25 years.
At best, it should be the comic
relief character in a Pixar movie
where a bunch of talking guns
learn the value of found family.
Judges may not have a lot of room
for leniency in cases like that,
thanks to mandatory
minimum sentencing laws,
which trigger based on
the severity of the crime.
And because the ATF's making
the crime up in the first place,
they can make sure it meets
mandatory minimums
by inventing drug amounts that
trigger long sentences,
or pressuring targets into doing
things that increase the penalty.
In one sting out of Wichita,
ATF agents suggested a felon
take a shotgun, saw it off,
and bring it back to them,
even providing
instructions on how to do it.
That sawed-off gun allowed them to
charge him with a more serious crime.
And if you're thinking, "Well,
hold on, isn't all this entrapment?"
You would think so,
but it turns out,
the legal bar for proving
entrapment is incredibly high.
One big reason is that, in court,
prosecutors simply have to show
you're doing something you'd have
been "predisposed" to do anyway,
and depending on your case,
things like prior convictions
and drug addiction
could qualify.
Often, all they have to show is that
you were willing to commit the crime.
But a key reason people
can be willing to do that
is because they've just been
offered a lot of money.
All of which makes it feel pretty
predatory that these stings
can actively target low-income
communities.
In California, a federal judge
even accused ATF agents
of "trolling poor
neighborhoods for suspects."
Investigations have also found stings
disproportionately target minorities.
One that looked at seven years
of stash house stings
in the greater Chicago area found
that, of the people charged in them,
92% were Black or Hispanic.
And when a retired ATF
agent was asked to explain
why they chose certain areas,
his answer wasn't great.
Why do a stash house investigation
in Englewood,
as opposed to some other place?
We don't. We do them anywhere
that we find that there's people
that are willing to participate
in that level of violence,
those are people we're going
to want to talk to.
Again, this is a kill or be killed
proposition.
It doesn't matter if you're in
Englewood, the West Side,
Detroit, New Orleans, anywhere.
Any community where
we can find those violent people,
then we'll provide them
with this opportunity.
What a fascinating, off-the-top-of
your-head list that was.
Englewood, the West Side, Detroit
or New Orleans.
All-fun fact-majority Black areas.
He's only one step away
from adding Wakanda
to that list.
And disproportionate targeting
has been baked into stings
from the very beginning.
Remember the fake mafia guys
buying fenced goods?
It rounded up about 120 people,
although "most were not
experienced traffickers,"
"but unemployed Black men who had
heard about the high prices"
"being offered at the warehouse and had
decided to steal something."
Flash forward to 2018, and law
enforcement in Chicago
were using a "bait truck"
that they filled with Nike sneakers
and parked in an impoverished
neighborhood,
something that justifiably infuriated
community members.
Instead of y'all chasing crime,
you're trying to create crime.
On this YouTube video posted by
anti-crime activist Charles McKenzie,
outraged residents
call that entrapment.
- Y'all baiting our young kids.
- It's a bait truck, man.
Y'all parked an empty Nike truck.
This is bogus, and y'all shouldn't
be entrapping Black people.
It's real crimes being committed.
Why do you gotta do this?
Why don't you go and preach
to somebody else, huh?
Put this in your neighborhood!
Yeah, fair point.
And I know it's a little hard to tell
what that cop
dropped on the ground there,
but from context, I'm gonna
just guess it's his dignity.
But it is not just racial
or economic targeting,
stings can also sweep up people
who might be easier for cops
to manipulate,
due to mental illness
or disabilities.
Just listen to these parents of
an autistic teenager in California
tell the story of how
some happy news from school
quickly took
a turn for the worse.
He told me that he met
a new friend in art class
and I was
completely amazed by that.
It seemed like they were having
these great conversations
or what seemed typical
for a teenager,
because there was such a furious
amount of texting going on.
But those texts weren't just
friendly teenage banter.
Instead, their son's new friend was
pressuring him to buy marijuana,
and this new friend
wasn't just a teenager,
he was an undercover cop who went
by the name of Daniel Briggs.
It took the Snodgrasses' son
three weeks to buy half a joint
of pot off a homeless man.
A few weeks later, armed policemen
walked into his classroom
and arrested him
in front of his peers.
22 students were arrested
in the drug sting.
Most of them
were special needs students.
That is appalling.
And for what it's worth,
their son only got the joint
because his cop friend told him
"he was always in trouble
with his strict mom"
and was super stressed,
that's why he really needed it.
So, it seems that cop was truly
living by Mr. Rogers' famous advice:
"Look for the helpers, so you can
arrest them for weed possession."
In a sign of just how much the media
uncritically laps these stories up,
this is how those arrests
got covered on the local news.
Riverside County sheriff's deputies
have smashed an illegal drug ring
operating out of three
high schools in Temecula.
22 students were
taken into custody.
It was like "21 Jump Street."
Deputies say, during the investigation,
they seized all types of drugs:
meth, cocaine,
LSD and ecstasy.
Chaparral High School also had students
escorted by police off campus.
This picture shows one
of five arrests made there.
That kid on the screen there
was the one who spent weeks
trying to buy
half a joint for his friend
because he was worried about him.
But I can see why the news
didn't lead with that angle.
"Cops Bust Massive Drug
Ring" is a much cooler story
than "Cops Manipulate-slash-
Arrest Autistic Teen."
And it goes way beyond
school drug busts.
An investigation
into another ATF practice,
of setting up fake stores to buy drugs
and guns,
found them repeatedly manipulating
people with disabilities.
In one case, agents set up
a fake smoke shop in Portland
and paid a 19-year-old
who was mentally disabled,
and his friend, to promote their
store by, and this is true,
getting a large tattoo on their necks
of the fake shop's emblem,
which was a giant squid
smoking a joint.
Which is utterly despicable.
And when a judge later reprimanded
the government lawyer for that,
I'd argue she did it
in far too casual a manner.
It was government money that
was used to pay for the tattoos?
I believe so.
Could you send a message back
ATF.
It's really a bad idea.
Nothing unlawful about it,
but not a good idea.
"Not a good idea"?
Look, there is a time to be polite,
but "finding out agents
just used taxpayer money"
"to tattoo a teen with mental
disabilities" is not it.
I looked up that exact situation in
Emily Post's book of etiquette,
and her advice just says, "Fuck those
fuckers sideways with a rusty fork."
I didn't say that. Emily Post did.
So, you know it's official.
And if it wasn't enough for cops to
prey on disabled or desperate people,
there is one more way they can make
things easy on themselves with stings
and that is by using
"confidential informants," or CIs,
basically, people they convince
to go undercover on their behalf,
sometimes by paying them,
but often by taking people
they've already arrested
and pressuring them to work
as CIs to obtain their freedom.
As this ex-cop readily explains,
using these sources
can really speed things up
when it comes to making a case.
If you had not been able, personally,
to use confidential informants,
would you have been as effective?
Nowhere near as effective.
- I know I would not.
I may have to watch a house for days
or weeks to establish probable cause.
My informant goes in
and makes a buy out of it
and I have my probable cause
in five minutes.
Look, I will concede,
that man in particular is going to have
a hard time going undercover.
Because if you showed me that guy
and gave me three guesses
what he does for a living,
they'd be, in order: cop,
cop, and guy
who plays cop in porn.
And the appeal for police
in CIs is obvious:
they're people who may already be
known and trusted in their community.
And, crucially, as civilians,
they're subject to even fewer rules
and restrictions than cops regarding
conduct during an investigation.
But there are
some obvious issues here.
First, because CIs can be paid,
or working under the threat
of jail time,
they can be under huge pressure
to produce whatever info cops need,
whether it is reliable or not,
meaning they might well
fabricate information.
Also, cops can look the other way
at crimes their CIs have committed
or even continue to commit
while they're working for them.
And finally, if you're thinking
pressuring untrained civilians
into doing the job of undercover
cops feels like it could end badly,
you're right about that.
There've been multiple stories of CIs
being assaulted or murdered
in the course of working
for the police.
As this expert points out, there are
a whole host of issues CIs raise,
but the limited nature of disclosure
on these operations
means we don't know
the full extent of any of them.
There is no law enforcement
entity or official in this country
that knows how many
informants there are,
how many crimes they solve,
and how many crimes are tolerated
by law enforcement,
by the informants that they run.
Exactly. And it is probably
not a great sign
that we have less information
about confidential informants
than we do about how
many toilets Meghan Trainor
and her Spy Kid husband have.
And it's not just information
I don't think I was actually clear
about that, they have two.
They have two toilets right next
to each other so they can piss,
and presumably shit together,
without breaking eye contact.
That is from their old house.
They've since moved,
and are opting for a, quote,
"knees to knees" setup.
Yeah, I don't like knowing
this about them either!
But at least
we're on the same page now.
Anyway, it's not just information
on confidential informants,
public data on stings in general
is extremely limited,
partly because they're usually not
subject to public disclosure laws.
And that, mixed with a near
limitless ability for cops
to target anyone they want,
is a truly dangerous combination.
And if you want to see everything that
we've discussed tonight in one place,
just look at counterterrorism stings.
After 9/11, the FBI went hard
in trying to preemptively stop
the next big terror attack.
One hallmark of this involved stings
targeted at Muslim communities.
And these cases resulted
in a lot of convictions.
A survey two years ago found that,
out of 992 terrorism
defendants since 9/11,
just three have been acquitted
and four have seen their charges
dropped or dismissed,
giving the Justice Department a
near-perfect record of conviction
when it comes to terrorism cases.
But that same report also found
that the majority of defendants
had no direct connection to terrorist
organizations at all,
and over a third had been
caught up in FBI stings.
And some of those
were incredibly dicey,
like the case of these four men
in Newburgh, New York,
who the FBI claimed planned to
attack synagogues and an airport.
And at the time, they trumpeted
the arrests as a huge deal.
We have breaking news. The FBI
says it has thwarted a terror plot.
Federal investigators say
the suspects are four men with
a shared hatred for America.
According to the FBI, the four men
intended to carry out their plan today.
The good news here
is that our FBI and our NYPD
did a very, very good job.
The fact that we've been able
to penetrate these groups early on,
they were being monitored
for close to a year.
This is truly a textbook example
of how a major investigation
should be conducted.
That sounds
pretty impressive, doesn't it?
But you should know, while
"friend of the Baileys" Chuck Schumer
was bragging that the FBI was able
to penetrate the group very early on,
the reason for that is,
they're the ones
who put the group together
in the first place.
The entire plan
was concocted by the FBI.
So, I guess it really was textbook,
if the textbook was called
"How to Solve Crimes When
You're the One Doing Them."
The truth is, none of the four
men arrested were militants.
They were, however,
impoverished individuals,
one of whom
had severe mental health issues.
They were recruited by
an informant,
who'd promised them huge financial
inducements to carry out the plot,
including 250.000 dollars,
free holidays, and expensive cars.
And that informant then
did everything for the men,
from getting the missile
and bombs
to teaching them
the tenets of radical Islam.
One of their attorneys actually
summed up the whole situation
pretty succinctly.
The government conceded at trial
that these four defendants
never had a plan,
never had done this before, had
no technology ability to do this,
had no access
to these kind of weapons,
had no access to the money
to make these kind of bombs,
had no access to terrorists
to come up with the ideas,
had no access to anything,
even cars.
These four defendants
were no more capable
of firing a Stinger missile
Tony the Tiger could make a bomb
from a Frosted Flakes box.
Yeah, that is both infuriating
and completely true,
right up to his claim
about Tony the Tiger.
I know this isn't the point.
Tony is a fictional character.
Therefore, in his world,
he is capable of anything,
including bomb-making.
Now, do I believe
the good folks at Kellogg
would put a bomb-maker
on their cereal box? No.
But could Tony conceptually build
a bomb in the universe he inhabits?
Of course he could.
And by that logic,
you could make the case that he was
actually more equipped to do terrorism
than these people the FBI
railroaded for no fucking reason!
Ultimately, the men were sentenced
in 2011
to a mandatory minimum
of 25 years in prison.
Although, three years ago,
the judge in their case granted a
motion for compassionate release,
calling their conduct heinous,
but acknowledging,
"The real lead conspirator
was the United States,"
which, depressingly, is pretty much
modern world history in a sentence.
And you can see just how tempting
it is for law enforcement to do this,
especially whenever there is
a panic about a certain population.
More recently,
it has been immigrants.
You may remember when Trump
and the media were freaking out
about that video
that supposedly proved
Tren de Aragua gangs were taking
over Colorado apartment complexes.
It was undeniably
a frightening image.
And in the wake of that, the ATF ran
a sting operation in that town,
with undercover agents offering large
sums to Venezuelan immigrants
to procure them guns and drugs.
And last summer, DOJ officials
called a press conference
to proudly show off the results.
In a matter of minutes,
we learned this was
far more than a news conference
about arrests, drugs, and guns.
The 10-month undercover
operation produced 30 arrests,
including three
described as TDA leaders,
along with five other
alleged TDA members,
the others labeled as actively involved
in TDA criminal activity.
TDA has brought its terrorism
to the United States.
TDA is real, it is dangerous,
and we have made prosecuting TDA
a priority in the district of Colorado.
Okay, so, there is
a lot to unpack there,
from the elaborate work that went
into their massive gun diorama,
to what is in those baggies,
because it looks to me
like Pink Panther jizz.
But the thing is, as one
reporter's since put it,
the results of that sting in court
have failed to back up the hype.
Because filings suggest
most of the people charged
weren't actually gang members
at all,
but a loose collection of impoverished
and desperate immigrants
drawn in by offers of cash.
In fact, when it comes to those
firearms, it's worth knowing,
many of the drugs and guns weren't
in the defendants' possession
before the government got involved.
The feds basically dangled money in
front of a bunch of desperate people,
said, "Go get us guns,"
and they did it.
And all that really proves is that,
for enough money,
you can basically
get people to do anything.
Which, not for nothing, was,
I believe,
also the official slogan of
the Riyadh Comedy Festival.
The point here is,
the long history of police stings
has far too often left us with a bunch
of fake crimes
from manufactured criminals resulting
in very real punishments.
And look, I am not saying
the crimes you've seen people
arrested for tonight don't happen.
Of course they do.
People do sell drugs in schools,
traffic guns, plan terror
attacks, and molest children.
And those crimes
should be investigated.
The problem with stings is,
they're an easy way for police
to rack up arrests and sell illusion
that they're addressing these crimes,
even when that
may not actually be the case.
Remember that county in Florida,
where Grady Judd loves
to hold press conferences
about his online sex stings?
It's currently being sued
by this woman,
who came to them at age 12
because she'd been sexually abused
by her adoptive father for years.
The investigation by Judd's department
was an absolute disgrace.
The detective who handled her case
failed to collect key evidence,
and, as her supervisor later wrote,
conducted an interview of the girl
using "inappropriate
questions and statements."
Judd's department
ultimately wound up charging the girl
with "giving false information
to a law enforcement officer",
for which
she was placed on probation,
and also made to write
these letters of apology
to both her abuser
and the sheriff's office.
It was only
after she was abused again,
during which she had the presence
of mind to take photos and video
of the incident on her phone,
that her abuser was finally arrested
and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Which is clearly infuriating.
She basically had to do that
department's work for them.
And it makes you think that
maybe Grady Judd's office
would've been a little better
at protecting an actual child
if they weren't spending all day
pretending to be one online.
Now, Judd never responded
to us when we asked him about this,
but apparently
I still have to tell you
that they've called that woman's
lawsuit "frivolous" and "baseless".
And I don't know, man.
When you've made a literal child
write a letter of apology
to her rapist,
I wouldn't be throwing
the word "frivolous" around.
I might just shut the fuck up about
everything for the rest of my life.
But I guess reasonable people
can agree to disagree there.
And when you put all this together,
it's hard not to conclude
that stings might actually be
doing more harm than good.
So, what do we do?
Well, I would argue,
at the very least, cops should be
doing much less of them,
and ideally, none of the stings
where the goal is basically,
"find anybody for anything."
As one expert put it,
if we're gonna do stings,
they should be "narrowly focused
on individuals"
"who law enforcement have credible
evidence may be planning"
"to commit a serious or violent
crime imminently,"
"or who have already done so and
are planning to do so again."
Which seems right to me.
Because as it stands,
police seem utterly addicted
to stings,
even though,
for what it's worth,
making up imaginary crimes
and arresting people for them
isn't law enforcement,
it is theater.
The one reform that might actually
be within all our control right now
is to try and remember that we
are all the audience for that theater.
So, if you are serving on a jury,
or work in the media,
or you see a story on TV
about a sting operation,
it's worth questioning what role
law enforcement played
in creating the crime
that they just supposedly stopped.
Honestly, we first started looking
at this story a few years ago,
and it has changed
how I've viewed
every sting story
that's made headlines since.
Remember when that group of men
were arrested
for trying
to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer?
Guess how many confidential informants
seemed to help that plot along?
I'll give you a clue: it is a
lot more than you would like!
You don't have to sympathize with
these men or agree with their views
to wonder if that plan could've
even gotten off the ground
if there hadn't been as many as a dozen
confidential informants involved
and two undercover federal agents.
The point here is,
cops have been getting away with
bullshit stings for far too long,
and we just cannot
let this slide anymore.
In fact, there's really
only one type of cops sliding
that I am completely
on board with,
and I think we all know
what it is.
Fuck you, Paul Thomas Anderson.
That is the best picture
of any goddamn year right there.
That is our show, thanks for watching.
We'll see you next week, good night!