The Throwaways Kenya Stillman Summary

In the article “The Throwaways” award winning staff writer for the New Yorker Sarah Stillman tells the account of the use of confidential informants being used as inexpensive pawns in the drug war. A confidential informant is a person who has been caught for a crime, usually illegal narcotics, and has been offered to have their slate wiped clean or their punishment reduced if they help bust a higher up criminal. Police tend to enlist young offenders as confidential informants. However the work is high risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal. Stillman tells the accounts of four young people who were killed working as informants — Rachel Hoffman, Shelly Hilliard, LeBron Gaither, and Jeremy McLean — and follow their families’ pursuit of

Hoffman was killed because the police were lost track of her even though they knew it was high risk. An investigation showed that “at least twenty-one violations of nine separate policies” had occurred in Hoffman’s case. McLean who had only intended to only do a few cases but ended up performing in “more than a dozen operations” in which one dealer was released and threatened McLean. He reported these threats to the authority but they didn’t take it serious saying “It’s just hearsay”. This negligence led to Mclean later getting killed by the same dealer. Gaither was sent to deal with a dealer who he had already testified against in a case that “attorney later called the most “reckless, stupid, and idiotic idea” he had seen in his nineteen years of legal work.” The dealer had learned of Gaither’s testimony and killed him during the encounter. Hilliard had set up a drug dealer who was released later that same day, found her, and killed her. No police protection was provided for her and one witness testified that “the police had revealed Shelly’s

One statistic provided is that “up to eighty per cent of all drug cases” involve an informant. The reason for this she learns from “Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a leading expert on informants” is because it’s “cheap”. Natapoff describes how it is also less work to use informants because it “involves no paperwork”. Stillman also gets the side of law enforcement by talking with Brian Sallee, “a police officer who is the president of B.B.S Narcotics Enforcement Training and Consulting”. Sallee says how the use of informants is crucial to them because without them according to him “narcotics operations would practically cease to function”. Stillman has these statements in the article to show how important the informants are to the police but still “used without regard for their safety” and treated as “disposable pawns” since according to Natapoff, there is “no institutional oversight” to correct