There is a city in Louisiana called Alexandria. A woman wearing a microphone and hidden camera walked up to a dilapidated drug house on a chilly afternoon last year to buy meth from a dealer known on the streets as "Mississippi."
As the confidential source disappeared inside with a career criminal with a rap sheet, her law enforcement handler left her undercover on her own. She carried devices that recorded a crime much worse than any drug buy.
According to interviews and confidential law enforcement records obtained by The Associated Press, the dealer forced the woman to perform oral sex on him twice in an attack that was so brazen he paused to conduct a separate drug deal.
A local official who viewed the footage told the AP that it was one of the worst depictions of sexual abuse he had ever seen.
The official said that the audio was enough to make you angry. A female is being sexually brutalized while she cries.
Even as the woman cried and her attacker threatened to put her in the hospital, narcotics agents remained down the street, unaware of what was happening. The devices the woman carried didn't have the ability to transmit the operation to law enforcement in real time.
Rapides Parish Sheriff Mark Wood blamed his inexperience when he was in the top job for the January 2021. There are things that you can improve upon.
In this central Louisiana city of 47,000, there is a case that shows the dangers of confidential sources trying to work off criminal charges. Police often give little or no training to the people they rely on for information in a wide variety of cases.
It wasn't until the woman left the area on her own that the sheriff's office searched the home and arrested Antonio D. Jones, 48, on charges of rape, false imprisonment and distribution of meth.
The ranking officer in the operation said that after the woman went inside, they assumed she must be okay because someone else entered after her to purchase drugs.
The sheriff's office didn't start using equipment capable of monitoring in real time until after the alleged rape, and often used sting operations without recording equipment at all.
We've done it this way before. We used her as a confidential source because she was an addiction junkie. It is easy to say "What if?".
While it is not clear what kind of deal the woman struck with the Rapides Parish Sheriff's Office, her cooperation as an Informant didn't seem to make a difference in clearing her criminal record.
Three weeks after her recorded assault, the woman was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia stemming from an arrest that happened about a month before the sting, and she has been pulled over and booked on possession charges at least two times. The woman who declined interview requests and is not being named because the AP does not typically identify victims of sexual assault pleaded guilty to possession of drug paraphernalia last year and was placed in behavioral health court.
The woman's attorney said it was horrible. I am not sure if she will be able to beat her drug problem. They arrest you for your drug problem when you become a snitch.
Wood, who worked in the sheriff's office for two decades before his election, said that the alleged rape has prompted his department to update its equipment to keep an eye on undercover transactions.
The way we do business was changed by that. The growth of technology has been amazing. We can do things to keep the people safe.
The technology to monitor undercover transactions has existed for a long time and should have been used to protect the woman in this case, according to experts who reviewed the case. They said that the safety of the confidential person is the most important aspect of the operation.
Michael Levine is a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who is an expert on police procedures. He said that the deputy should never have sent the person into such a high-risk setting. "They're cowardices."
David Redemann, a long time Seattle police officer who now leads training on such sting operations, said the case highlights the vast disparity in law enforcement's undercover tactics.
Redemann said that they do this 10,000 times a day around the country. Is this a sad thing? It's absolutely true. What happened here needs to be learned from.
According to a Harvard law professor, the use of confidential sources by law enforcement is like a black market in which deals are made under the table.
She said that qualified immunity makes it difficult to file a lawsuit against the police when things go wrong.
There is no law that says police have to protect their confidential sources.
Even in the wake of high-profile oversights, states have been slow to track or regulate the use of confidential sources. Rachel's Law, the first comprehensive legislation of its kind in the country, was adopted by the Florida Legislature after the death of a young woman in a drug sting. The law requires police to take into account the risk of physical harm to the person they are talking to.
The sheriff said that no other law enforcement agencies were asked to look into the case. A spokesman for the Alexandria Police Department said the agency had not been made aware of the sexual assault, even though the suspect Jones has an extensive criminal history dating to 1992.
Jones is scheduled to go to trial on October 17th. His attorney didn't say anything.
The amount of time Jones could spend behind bars was lowered when prosecutors reduced his charges from forcible second-degree rape to third-degree rape.
The prosecutor's office didn't reply to questions about why the charges were reduced or why the woman was charged with drug crimes even after she cooperated in the sting.
The Rapides Parish District Attorney told the AP that there was no indication that law enforcement did anything wrong. The district attorney said he was certain that they wish this wouldn't have happened, because they had not considered the possibility of an attack on a confidential person.
Had they known that was happening they would have stopped it. Their biggest concern is the safety of the confidential person.
That's right.
Investigative@ap.org is where you can contact AP. Jim Mustian has a verified account on the social networking site.
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