WHY WAS INFORMER PUT AT RISK?

Tallahassee officials did the right thing by asking Attorney General
Bill McCollum to review how 23-year-old Rachel Hoffman became a police
informant and wound up a murder victim. There are troubling questions
about how Tallahassee police recruited the Countryside High and
Florida State University graduate for a sting and how they failed to
protect her when it went horribly wrong.

When police served a search warrant on Hoffman's apartment in April
and found marijuana and ecstasy, she agreed to become an informant in
exchange for avoiding charges and a trip to jail. Police never told
prosecutors about the search or her recruitment, even though Hoffman
already was in a pretrial diversion program to resolve earlier charges
of marijuana possession and resisting arrest. That was a mistake, and
the department's argument that notification wasn't necessary because
Hoffman was in diversion rather than on probation does not hold water.
Leaving prosecutors out of the loop leaves too much room for abuse by
police.

If the idea behind keeping Hoffman out of jail and not informing
prosecutors was to maintain secrecy, police failed to impress upon her
the importance of keeping quiet. She sent a text message about the
undercover operation to her boyfriend, and her friends told the
Tallahassee Democrat she was afraid. McCollum should look closely at
how police prepared Hoffman for the operation.

It is common for police to use low-level drug users to go after bigger
dealers. But this was a young woman with a history of marijuana
possession who was supposed to buy 1,500 ecstasy pills, 2 ounces of
cocaine and a gun. That sudden escalation could have raised suspicions
and triggered a change in location for Hoffman's meeting with two men
arrested in Orlando on charges of robbery and kidnapping. Why police
did not prevent her from abandoning the agreed upon location for the
meeting and why they lost track of her until her body was found two
days later in Taylor County are among the questions left to be answered.

Rachel Hoffman agreed to help Tallahassee police and become an
informant in order to avoid drug charges. The police arranged the
terms without notifying prosecutors or her lawyer, then failed to help
her when she needed it most. They let her down, and McCollum needs to
determine why it happened and recommend reforms.