Here is the proposal:

The narcs lure a drug dealer to town with the promise of beaucoups amounts of drugs for retail sale. Dealer comes and pays thousands of dollars and gets busted.

Anyone doing this? If so, has anyone had problems? I am not talking about a Tulia situation using CI's - just the narcs themselves.

My main concern would be to make sure you steer clear of possible entrapment claims. Make sure the officers offer "fair market pricing," don't make pleas of extreme need, threats, promises, etc. Do you plan on having officers actually have drugs ready to show? Wouldn't think drug dealer would just show up and give money without looking at and sampling goods.

You have to make the deal for a First Degree amount of drugs to meet the elements of 481.126. It will not work if the narc's do not have the real thing (drugs). The crooks will likly want a test run for a small amount - then what do you do? If you talk them in to a first degree amount, they will validly raise entrapment. The closest we ever came to doing something like a reversal was after an arrest of a mule, we got the mule to call his contact and claim to be broken down. The contact was arrested when he showed up to pick up the mule (the mule was in jail and the dope was in the evidence room.) He was initially arrested for illegal investment, but prosecuted for conspiracy to possess with intent to deliver.

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Originally posted by MDK:

The narcs lure a drug dealer to town with the promise of beaucoups amounts of drugs for retail sale. Dealer comes and pays thousands of dollars and gets busted.

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Maybe they should talk to the former police chief in Murphy, who ended up being relieved of duty after he allowed NBC to lure sex offenders to their quiet little town so they could be busted. Seems that the citizenry were less than thrilled to hear that the chief's definition of "protect and serve" included bringing criminals into town rather than getting them out!

Thanks for the input - the boss wasn't crazy about the idea - some of her buddies said "oh, yeah, you can do it...but, erm, we don't".......

This forum has become extremely useful since I RETIRED from the Bell County DA's Office, and then decided to come to Seguin. Don't ask me why............

[This message was edited by MDK on 07-17-08 at .]

I've worked with cops on a number of reversals, and never had a problem on the legal side. Juries don't mind hammering dealers caught in a sting either. I never had an entrapment issue raised, and don't think it could possibly fly.

Reversals, however, are very labor intensive for police, and it helps to have some experienced hand doing the u/c work, as well as someone else running the security (surveillance and bust teams) when the deal is supposed to go down. You need to find a quantity of high quality stuff to be able to show to the crooks when they come calling, and you can't let that stuff get away. Some of these dealers bring some muscle with them, and have counter surveillance teams working as well. Drug dealers never arrive on time, and always want to change the location of the deal. You spend a lot of time cooling your heals in your surveillance cars waiting for these people to show up.

Another thing is that most of the time the dealer your u/c cop hooks up with is a broker, rather than a principle, and brokers often talk bigger than they can deliver.

All said, it takes a lot of police work. But the rewards are great too. You can take down a pretty big criminal organization, creating risk for the people who most profit from the drug trade, and you can make some money for the police agencies involved as well as your office.

My advice is to encourage the cops to do it, but try to get them to bring in someone who has some good experience in running such an operation to learn how its done.