Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team has covered wrongdoing for decades, both before and after the shocking 2003 revelations about the Catholic Church’s massive child sex abuse crisis, which were featured in Tom McCarthy’s 2015 film Spotlight. The latest investigation is Spotlight: Snitches Town, a print and podcast series that exposes how police abused a confidential informant system in the historic port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Once a whaling stronghold, New Bedford is known for its vibrant fishing industry and cobblestone streets; it’s where Ishmael met Queequeg in Moby-Dick. Like most American cities, it has a drug problem, and cops are eager to bust drug dealers. To do this, they use confidential informants, typically vulnerable people connected to the illegal drug trade, to obtain information about who is selling drugs and how. In New Bedford, long a center of drug trafficking, police have been given considerable latitude in their use of informants, with little oversight over their actions. Some of these informants have gotten out of hand. In “Snitch City,” profiled by reporter Dugan Arnett, we hear about a variety of forms of snitching: cops have sex with informants, invent nonexistent informants, lie, steal, manipulate, collude, and break laws to boost their clearance rates. Informants are rarely willing to cooperate; some feel trapped, and others feel they cannot refuse without facing police retaliation. “For a lot of these cops, it's a game, and to win, they have to think like criminals,” the reform attorney tells Arnett. “And they start acting like criminals.”
“Snitch Town” begins with a visual narrative. On a warm summer night in 2018, a 911 dispatcher receives a call from a crew member on a scallop boat called the Little Tootie, moored for the night on the New Bedford waterfront. The crew is asleep or preparing for an early morning run, but an angry man comes aboard looking for drugs. He has bloodshot eyes, dresses in black, and carries a pistol; he also has a badge. We hear snippets of the 911 call (“He says he’s a cop, but he doesn’t have any warrants,” the fisherman says) and a police radio dispatching an officer to the scene. In a voiceover, the arriving officer, Mark Raposo, recalls his suspicions along the way. “I think at this point, I probably put two and two together,” he says. He believes the intruder is Jorge Santos, a young officer who is said to conduct frequent searches, particularly among Spanish-speaking fishermen. On the boat, Raposo finds Santos, off duty, wearing sweatpants and carrying a gun. The alarmed fishermen think he is trying to rob them. Raposo says, “Jorge, what are you doing? What is this?” Santos replies that he is acting on instructions from a confidential informant. “Those two words — ‘confidential informant’ — are like a spell,” Arnett tells us. “As soon as they are uttered, it’s like a veil of mystery.” The mention of the words gives Santos a plausible alibi, but Raposo still doesn’t buy it. “It looked like a drug ring,” he tells Arnett. “It looked like something out of a movie.” (Or The Wire, in the vein of Omar Little.) In the community, one fisherman says, Santos was nicknamed Officer Pastillas—”Officer Pills.” Interestingly, he wasn't even a drug cop; he and Raposo were in the Marine Corps.
Left unchecked, institutional secrecy can fuel abuse. That was one of the key lessons of Spotlight’s investigation into sexual abuse in the Church, and it’s a theme that emerges here, too. Arnett became interested in the New Bedford situation two years ago, when a woman trapped by a police informant sent him an email with the subject line “I NEED HELP.” Arnett and his fellow reporters began investigating her case and others; over two years, they had amassed compelling evidence that twelve New Bedford police officers were abusing the confidential informant system and using it to break the law. Spotlight reporters also found that about ninety percent of drug busts in Massachusetts cited a confidential informant—in New Bedford, the figure was ninety-nine percent, and usually involved a single source—and that dozens of Massachusetts law enforcement agencies had no policies, transparency, or accountability for informants. The fairness of the system depends on the honesty of individual police officers.
Over the course of six episodes, a series of memorable interlocutors give a human face to the team's shocking discoveries. Raposo comes across as a decent man who sees service as
Sourse: newyorker.com
