PULASKI POLICE CHARGE INFORMANT IN BOTCHED RAID

The Pulaski police chief said the same man had provided good tips in
investigations of 14 other felonies.

PULASKI - An informant who sparked a mistaken drug raid on a Pulaski
couple's apartment was so caught up in the cloak-and-dagger mystique
that he made up a tale to continue the thrill, the town's police chief
said Tuesday.

The man, whom police would not identify, is in custody and charged
with providing false information to authorities, a misdemeanor. The
arrest warrant had not yet been returned Tuesday afternoon to General
District Court, where it will be public information.

Pulaski Police Chief Herb Cooley said the informant had worked on 14
other felony cases, including investigations of drugs and
counterfeiting, for town police. When he approached investigators with
tales of a methamphetamine lab operating inside a Pulaski apartment,
the information seemed to check out, Cooley said.

"He had done a good job in the past. We had no reason to not believe
this guy," Cooley said.

Officers with the town's narcotics team raided the apartment of
William and Geneva Summers about 4 a.m. Monday. Armed with a search
warrant and weapons, the team broke through a back door and held the
couple at gunpoint. Officers realized they had made a terrible
mistake, and the informant soon admitted his lies.

Cooley said the department is sorry the incident occurred. Officers
apologized to the couple Monday.

Confidential informants are routinely used by law enforcement in
different types of cases. Some are petty criminals who agree to
provide evidence in hopes of leniency. Others are people who just hope
to lend a hand.

The informant in Pulaski's case was one of those people who wanted to
help thwart the drug trade in the community, Cooley said.

"This was a citizen and a resident of the community with a job who
offered to help," he said.

Last week, the man told police he had been inside an apartment on
Second Street and seen a methamphetamine lab and weapons, according to
an affidavit used to obtain a search warrant for the property.

Cooley said the man signed a statement about what he had seen, agreed
to testify to that information in court and provided police with a
layout of the house. But the floor plan drawn by the informant showed
two apartments in the bottom floor of the old house - one occupied by
the Summerses and a second, which contained the supposed drug lab,
occupied by people from Guatemala and children.

In reality, the bottom floor of the house contains just one apartment,
which the Summerses call home.

But, going on the information they had been given, investigators
pushed forward. Methamphetamine labs are unstable and prone to
explosions. Children were reportedly inside the home. And when police
staged the early morning raid, they had the town's fire and rescue
units and representatives of social services on standby, just in case,
Cooley said.

He said investigators couldn't walk inside to verify the information
for fear of blowing the case.

"We felt like we had checked it out by using someone who had been
inside," Cooley said.

On Saturday, Pulaski officers obtained their search warrant from
Magistrate Jill Long at the New River Valley Regional Jail. The
affidavit asking permission for a search must spell out all evidence
investigators have to support their allegations, and a magistrate
reads that information and decides if those facts show probable cause.

"Probable cause is basically what a reasonable person would conclude
is going on," Long said Tuesday.

A magistrate is appointed by the court system to issue warrants for
arrests and searches and set bonds of those arrested, among other duties.

What constitutes probable cause for a search warrant varies from case
to case, Long said. Pulaski's narcotics team used their "reliable
informant," a person who has established a track record of providing
solid information to investigators in the past.

Eric Sterling of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a Washington,
D.C.-based organization that studies trends in anti-crime policies,
said it is common nationwide for investigators to get search warrants
based solely on an informant's word.

"The requirement of reliability of an informant is not extensive. It
could mean that half of what an informant has said has been true,"
Sterling said. "No one writes that an unreliable informant told them
something. The words 'reliable' and 'informant' go together like 'hot'
and 'dog.'"

Long said Tuesday she could not remember the specifics of the town's
search warrant because she didn't have the document in front of her as
she spoke. But she said it is unusual that someone classified as a
reliable informant would lie.

"I've never heard of that happening before," she said.

Sterling said the town is lucky no one was injured during the raid.
The Summerses both suffer from health problems, and the couple has an
old shotgun hanging on the bedroom wall.

Sterling said although informants often do lie to authorities, they
rarely fabricate the whole story.

"There is no real advantage to an informant giving bogus information
where he simply picks up an address and makes up information that is
completely wrong. It just ends up embarrassing the people he's working
for," Sterling said. "But these kinds of raids happen frequently, and
unfortunately, nothing happens to the informant."

The charge of providing false information to police is a misdemeanor
punishable by a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.