Police Stings: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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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 Hegg plans to fight the $230 ticket she got on Halloween day, accused with dozens of other drivers of not stopping to let a six-foot-four Donald Duck cross the street.

Then they just told me that I was getting a ticket because I didn't stop for 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 just 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 probably 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.

Wow, is that anchor okay? Okay. Cops say there was enough fentanyl to annihilate this God-forsaken 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 whilst 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.

Hey, brother, those people are undercover cops. I just got a citation for this.

Oh, really?

Yeah, they trapped me. Oh. Yep. Good job, guys. I'll see y'all in court. Oh, I thought your phone was dead. Oh, 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 cops' 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.

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It's still so good. It will never not be good. If I die with a smile on my face, you will know that that was the last thing I saw. Call that video Paul Rudd, because 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 here. And 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 protections 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.

But...

catching people on tape makes for very easy prosecutions.

in court with sting evidence.

was convicted when the jury saw the tapes.

it is usually pretty much game over, with one notable exception. and other tapes. Right, and that does make sense, doesn't it? Because once you have someone on tape,

they don't even know we're white. And first of all, oh, yes, they did. No one in the history of blackface has ever pulled it off. But 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 things as things 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 2, and Child Protector 2. 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

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 reversed big to 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 non-existent 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 startle 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 things 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.

for 25 years. which trigger based on the severity of the crime. And because the ATF's making the crime up in the first place,

or pressuring targets into doing things that increase the penalty.

even providing instructions on how to do it.

And if you think, well, hold on, isn't all this entrapment?

for proving entrapment is incredibly high. and drug addiction could qualify.

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 you 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. Now, one that looked at seven years of stash house stings in the greater Chicago area, found that of the people charged in them, 92 percent 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 Inglewood

as opposed to some other place? Well, 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 gonna 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 within that community, then we'll provide them uh, New Orleans, anywhere. Any community where we can find those violent people within that community, um, then we'll provide them with this opportunity.

Huh. 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 Sting's 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'd 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 trying to create crime.

On this YouTube video posted by anti-crime activist

Charles McKenzie, outraged residents call that entrapment.

Y'all baiting out y'all kids.

It's a bait truck, man. Y'all just baiting kids, we involved.

Y'all part of an empty Nike truck.

I think this is bogus, and y'all shouldn't be

entrapping black kids. I think it's bogus. It's real crimes being committed. Why do you gotta do this?

Why don't you go preach to somebody else?

Huh? Go preach to somebody else. I can't tell what the cop dropped on the ground there, but from context, I'm gonna just guess it's his dignity.

for cops to manipulate due to mental illness or disabilities.

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, uh, they were having these... great conversations back and forth, 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 Snodgrass' 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. Twenty-two 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. And in a sign of just how much the media uncritically lapsed 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 it. 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 a government lawyer for that, I'd argue she did it in far too casual a manner.

But the agent, it was government money

that was used to pay for the tattoos?

I believe so.

Uh, could you send a message back to, uh, was it, which agency was doing it? Uh, ATF. That, uh, it's really a bad idea. Um, nothing unlawful about it, but, uh, not a good idea.

Not a good idea? Look, there is a time to be polite, but finding out agents just use taxpayer money to tattoo a teen with mental disabilities is not it. In fact, 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 C.I.s. 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 C.I.s 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.

You really feel you need this?

Oh, 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 buyout 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 C.I.s 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 C.I.s 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 C.I.s have committed or even continue to commit while they are 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 have been multiple stories of CIs being assaulted or murdered in the course of working for the police. In fact, 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 on confidential... You know what, 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. -$TIME OUT!

I don't like knowing this about them either, but at least we're on the same page now.

-$TIME OUT! -$TIME OUT!

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 counter-terrorism stings. After 9-11, the FBI went hard in trying to preemptively stop the next big terror attack. One hallmark of this involves 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 Bayleys, Chuck Schumer there, 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 promised them huge financial inducements to carry out the plot, including $250,000, 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 a trial that these four defendants never had a plan, never had done this before, had no technology ability to 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 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 or creating a bomb than, you know, Tony the Tiger could make a bomb,

frosted flights bombs.

Yeah.

That is both infuriating and completely true, right up to his claim about Tony the Tiger, because I know this isn't the point. Tony the Tiger 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's 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 can 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 trend 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 of money 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 ten-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 was 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 has since put it, the results of that sting in court have failed to back up the hype, because filing suggests

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 defenders' possession before the government got involved.

So 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 the 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. Judge'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 have 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 fucking 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... 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. In fact, 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 seem to help that plot along?

I'll give you a clue, it is a lot more than you would like. And 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 cop sliding that I am completely on board with. And I think we all know what it is.

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Fuck you, Paul Thomas Anderson. That is the best picture of any goddamn year right there.