Page 59 - 1Proactive Policing

Pro-Active Policing

representing eight people in a multi milliondollar lawsuit in which they claim to have been falsely
arrested by transit officers (not members of the decoy unit). Excerpts follow. RICHARD D.

EMERY 'Creating Crime' I think decoy squads, even well trained and well supervised, eventually
self destruct.

This is a result, in most cases, of the inevitable pressure to produce when there is this much
investment of personnel and resources in what usually turns out to be not an extremely productive

squad. You have four or five officers on a detail, spending one set of tours at least and probably
more, five days a week, conducting operations which result in sometimes several but other times
not so many arrests. And there is an inevitable, inexorable pressure to justify that expenditure.

Regrettably, the only way the police have traditionally attempted to justify that enormous

expenditure is through arrests. Consequently decoy squads are under pressure, at the end of a
week when there have been few arrests, to move toward entrapment, toward framing somebody,
toward 'flaking' somebody. They usually think they can get away with it and they usually can get

away with it, because it's four or five officers' words against one suspect, who's usually picked
because he or she
is vulnerable. But sooner or later that sort of scam catches up with the decoy squads, just as it did

in the mid1970' s when the 'dollar collars' scandal ended the last transit decoy squad. That's when
kids were lured by dollars hanging out of decoys' pockets.

There's concern at this point over evidence of alleged flakes of suspects, where valuables are
planted on arrestees by decoy officers, and robberies are staged between decoys to rope in an

innocent bystander who's the target and has the goods dumped on him by one of the decoys
posing as the mugger.

The tragedy of the decoy squad is that if improper arrests are made, it is extremely difficult to
defend against them. Any defendant caught up in a decoy scam stands almost no chance at all.

There's this large number of cops, and their testimony will be tailored, given their extensive
training and understanding of the entrapment laws, to obtain a conviction.

And the target will often be a person with a criminal record, even though he or she did not commit
this particular offense. There is also something just fundamentally offensive about cops creating
crime. Obviously, targeting people who are predisposed to criminal conduct is a desirable law

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