8/22/2023 0 Comments Police informant rules![]() Payments were always in cash and ranged from £50 to £100 – less than the days when he worked with Phil. At Mike’s instruction, they would follow vehicles and monitor people in the city, John claims. Mike, he says, would get into his marked delivery van in plain clothes, sometimes with colleagues and often unannounced. Years later, Mike moved to a police unit specialising in organised crime, and unlike Phil, he persisted in contacting John.Īs a delivery driver, John could cruise around Bristol without attracting too much attention. Over time they struck up an amicable relationship. John first met Mike** when he was a young beat officer who patrolled his neighbourhood. Police officer ‘Mike’ discloses to John sensitive information about the suspected movement of a firearm (Name of individual redacted by the Cable) Unlawful evidence? But a police officer from a different unit wouldn’t let him slip away so easily. John lost touch with Phil and the source handler team around 2013. I said, ‘I can’t handle this, stop.’ I said, ‘What the fuck are you trying to do, getting me involved with these people?’” In dealing with Phil, John had already become a Covert Human Intelligence Source, or CHIS, as authorised by a senior officer or ‘source controller’.Īfter a couple of years, John became jaded and afraid, and no longer wanted to provide information, he says. But what he didn’t know was that his signature wasn’t needed. Wary of being an official ‘grass’, John refused to sign any paperwork. “They got me to get people’s phone numbers, registration plates.” He was encouraged to take selfies at nightclubs with camera-shy gang enforcers, and to get close to relatives of the crime family. Town boy or not, Phil and his source handling team tasked John with surveillance. John apparently had aspirations of joining the National Crime Agency. ‘Phil’, as he called himself, became his handler – an officer who recruits and manages informants to gain intelligence. I might say hello to a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean I’m involved,’” he says. “They showed me pictures of ,” John tells the Cable. He caught the attention of an Avon and Somerset Police source handling team, who invited him for an introduction at Clifton Down station in 2010.īy playing on his professional ambitions, paying him, and massaging his ego, the police plied him for intelligence. When John went clubbing he’d brush shoulders with the old crowd – he had the right swagger, the gift of the gab, and was a likeable guy. John, a delivery driver, grew up in the same area as men who climbed the ranks of a major crime family in Bristol, and fed the city’s drug habit. ![]() Criminals talk to escape charges loose-lipped associates chase cash rivals undermine their competition some people are blackmailed. There are many reasons why people become police informants. But, pieced together from police documents, text messages and taped conversations, John’s story offers a compelling window onto how one man put his safety at risk in order to provide intelligence on organised crime –and raises worrying questions around how unscrupulous police work may have put the value of that evidence in doubt. The force will neither confirm nor deny any details of the inquiry. “I know at some point I’m going to be hurt – and I’ll hold Avon and Somerset Police responsible,” John tells the Cable, 10 years on from when he began trading information with detectives. Now, Avon and Somerset Police are investigating whether John was unlawfully used as an unregistered informant, and if police failings compromised his identity or jeopardised his safety. On one occasion a gangland enforcer warned him he faced being “chopped up”. Since being identified by an organised crime group (OCG) as a police ‘snitch’, John Atherton* has endured death threats and attempts to attack him.
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