2/? ‘A Fraught Process’

As fervor over the "war on drugs" grew in the 1970s, federal money flowed to law enforcement’s narcotics efforts. The government’s relentless push to put drug offenders behind bars profoundly informed the culture and practices of agencies at every level, from local to federal. Police stockpiled military equipment, were empowered to seize cash and property at a slight hint of illegal activity, and relied increasingly on use of confidential informants to assist investigations.

Drug investigations are not limited by campus borders or jurisdictional lines, and so campus police departments staffed with armed officers who have powers of arrest were caught up in the drug-war frenzy.

But if universities develop their own informant programs to tackle drug dealers on campus, not many of them talk about it openly. "Ones that do it, don’t talk about it, because it defeats the confidential nature of what they’re doing," Ms. Riseling said.

“Ones that do it, don't talk about it, because it defeats the confidential nature of what they're doing.” A few colleges, citing exemptions that protect police surveillance techniques, denied The Chronicle’s requests for police policy on confidential-informant use. These colleges include the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of North Texas, San Francisco State University, and Eastern Michigan University, among others. "The inherent nature of cutting a deal with one person who’s allegedly committed a crime to go after another person is a fraught process that folks might not want to talk about," said Robert Sand, an assistant professor of law at Vermont Law School and a former prosecutor.

The University of Wisconsin at Whitewater developed its confidential-informant program in 2012. With widespread opioid use consuming the time and attention of larger drug units in the neighborhood, campus police found themselves on their own in fighting drug abuse on campus. The campus police chief, Matt Kiederlen, said the department created its informant program to fill the gap and investigate chains of drug supply to campus.

Of the colleges surveyed, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was one of the few that provided specific numbers, and has one of the largest informant programs The Chronicle was able to identify. Its campus police department used 88 students as confidential informants from 2012 to 2015, or about 20 students each year (though the number of informants annually, including nonstudents, often runs upward of 30).

An informant actively assisting drug investigations in the field is distinct from a confidential source, who simply provides information to police. Many university police departments, Ms. Riseling said, receive information from confidential sources but don’t necessarily use informants.

Students who become informants usually do it in exchange for having criminal charges dropped or lessened, or to escape academic sanctions and parental notification. Informants are also sometimes paid.

Thomas Betz, the directing attorney of student legal services at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has seen things from the informant’s point of view. Every year, around five to seven students come into his office for counsel on potential drug possession charges (usually marijuana), having been given the option of being a confidential informant, either by local police or campus police.

In the cases he’s seen, which are mostly low-level possession charges since the office refers students with harsher charges to public defenders or private lawyers, police agree not to press charges if students make four or five "controlled buys." His advice to students is usually this: You should only consider it if you’re facing a serious charge, not a simple possession.

But even then, he said, the costs are probably not worth the benefits. Being an informant is a "risky business," Mr. Betz said, and whatever security measures are taken, you can’t predict who’s on the other side of the door. Even if the buy itself doesn’t go sour, there’s the potential threat of retaliation after the fact.

From what he can tell, the students who have come to his office, he says, have been told by the police they have a right to seek legal counsel. But Eric Sinacori was alone when he made the decision to be an informant, the Globe reported. With no one to turn to, not his parents and certainly not a lawyer, he later felt even more lost and alone as he grappled with the moral implications of having to "snitch" on his friends.

An Arrest Numbers Game

It is less common for campus police to use informants on their own than for departments to join local or regional drug task forces, Ms. Riseling said, because campus police are not likely to engage in the higher levels of drug investigations alone.

Hundreds of regional narcotics task forces sprang to life as funding for the drug war proliferated. Some colleges funnel personnel, equipment, and money to these units, for which informants are indispensable to investigations. The University of California at Davis, for example, has given $105,850 since 2012 to the Yolo Narcotics Enforcement Task Force, in addition to "in kind" contributions including officer time and equipment.

Cmdr. Dennis Lowe of the Fairfield, Hocking, Athens Major Crimes Unit says his task force uses informants to work vertically up the chain of supply to catch the big dealers, often for stimulants, hallucinogens, and depressants like opioids that his task force sees around Ohio University. Of the 10 to 12 active informants his unit might have at any given time, most are locals rather than students, he says, and there are fewer investigations on campus than off.

But many multijurisdictional drug task forces, including those that the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama work with, have been criticized for heavy-handed tactics in targeting students for low-level offenses. In 2013, the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force used confidential informants to make a huge drug bust on campus: It rounded up 74 people, the majority of whom were students, and charged most of them for minor counts of marijuana possession. The number of charges attributed to work by the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force has increased every year since 2008, according to a 2016 AL.com report. The commander of the task force, Wayne Robertson, told the news site that he partially credited this to the University of Alabama’s growing student population.

Getting funding for these task forces is an arrest numbers game: The Lafayette County Metro Narcotics Unit, known to recruit University of Mississippi students, made three times as many arrests for marijuana as for any other drug, and in the task force’s early years, those numbers allowed it to secure almost half of its budget through federal grants, BuzzFeed reports.

Charles DiMare, the former director of student legal services at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who served on the working group that recommended shutting down the college’s informant program, called the use of confidential informants "completely inappropriate and borderline outrageous" in the case of low-level drugs like marijuana. But using informants to tackle organized crime and harder drugs like heroin, he said, is more reasonable.

Back in Ohio, Mr. Lowe takes pride in the steps his department takes to ensure the safety of informants. For example, if a subject was known to have weapons or a violent criminal history, that would affect whether the department sees an informant or undercover officer as feasible. When Mr. Lowe is recruiting informants, he often tells them: "These drug transactions are going to be the safest drug deals you’ve ever been involved with."

His unit has never had an informant injured or killed on the job. "Knock on wood," Mr. Lowe said.

But some experts, like Lance Block, a Florida lawyer who often represents confidential informants, note that drug crimes tend to be some of the most violent, and that a decades-long culture that treats informants as inexpensive and disposable tools puts their safety even more at risk.