The States police handed over almost £65,000 to 64 informants – who may often be criminals themselves – in exchange for information on drug gangs and crime groups in Jersey between 2007 and last year.
The information led to 445 arrests and the seizure of more than £2 million in drugs and illegally earned cash. In 2015 and last year, the force paid an average of £488 to 16 separate sources.
Detective Inspector Lee Turner said the use of informants helped the force catch criminals who would otherwise not be stopped.
Jersey’s Customs and Immigration Service, which seized a total of £3.8 million worth of drugs last year and £375,815 of criminal cash, also use informants.
Andy Hunt, head of the service’s Intelligence Unit, said that criminals could be being watched at any time, even by those within their ranks.
Customs were unwilling to disclose how much they spend on paying informants, who are formally known as covert human intelligence sources, or CHIS’s for short.
However, Mr Hunt did say that informants were paid based on the quality of information they gave, results gained and the risk the source had gone to gather the intelligence.
Steve Le Marquand, director of Customs’ Law Enforcement division, said the use of informants was a ‘highly sensitive’ and ‘risky’ area of the service’s work, which had the potential to go ‘catastrophically wrong’ if not managed correctly.
Det Chief Insp Turner said the use of informants was a vital part of modern policing and that the force had a budget of £10,000 a year to pay informants.
On average every year the Force Intelligence Bureau, which collates and grades all forms of intelligence, receives about 7,000 different reports a year. Det Chief Insp Turner said that ‘several hundred’ of those reports came from informants.
‘The use of police informants has been around for a very long time and the value, challenges and risks of such covert work requires increasingly significant attention and effort,’ he added.
