HIGH TIME WE CLOSE THE DOOR ON AGE OF ENTRAPMENT

A few weeks ago in Chicago, an alderman named Rafael Frias was acquitted of
bribery. The jury's verdict surprised many of those who had followed the
trial: Frias had been caught accepting cash from a crooked waste-hauler in
exchange for help in winning approval for a rock-crushing site in Frias'
neighborhood.

It was all on tape. The rock-crushing deal was a scam created by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Attorney in Chicago.
The hauler, John Christopher, was working as an FBI informer.

To most of the people who read about it, the indictment was one more
depressingly familiar token of the moral climate of Chicago public life.

But the jurors, having heard all the evidence, decided it was something
else: a case of inexcusable law-enforcement excess. They heard the tape of
the money changing hands, but they also heard Frias, obviously troubled,
trying to extricate himself from the mess and refusing any more money, only
to have the undercover agents try to force it on him over and over again.

At one point, Christopher pulled $500 out of his pocket and started waving
it at Frias.

"Do you want this or not?" he asked.

No, Frias said, "that's not what I'm looking for."

This happened 17 times. The informer never managed to coax Frias into
making a second misstep.

"He kept saying no, no, he didn't want it," one of the jurors explained
after the trial, "but they kept coming after him. And that, really, is
entrapment."

I don't suppose Bill Clinton has ever heard of Rafael Frias, and I
certainly wouldn't argue that their situations are similar. Nobody has
tricked the president into doing anything. It is the presumed witness
against him, Monica Lewinsky, who has been the victim of entrapment.

But in a peculiar way, the two cases have something in common. The alderman
of the 12th Ward and the leader of the Free World have both become enmeshed
in a 1990s law-enforcement culture whose underlying premise is that, in the
investigation of public officials, all the rules are suspended. Any tactic
of deception is permissible, as long as a judge somewhere will allow it.

When it comes to the investigation of public officials, we are living in an
age of entrapment. We have been living in it for the better part of two
decades. Whatever may be its contributions to justice in individual cases,
it is not doing the country as a whole any good. Perhaps it is time to
think about a moratorium.

In 1980, the FBI began the current era with the use of ersatz Arab sheiks
and hidden tape recorders in the Abscam investigation that resulted in the
conviction of seven members of Congress. In the ensuing years, similar
sting operations with exotic names like Boptrot, Azscam, Greylord and Lost
Trust have brought down elected officials at every level of government --
mayors, city managers, county commissioners, state legislators and state
senators.

I have no doubt that in the vast majority of these cases, the departure of
the ensnared has raised the overall moral quality of the institutions in
which they served.

But the game is not worth the rules. In their zeal against public
corruption, agents and prosecutors have grown comfortable using tactics
that violate most Americans' instinctive sense of fair play.

Sometimes they violate simple common sense. Few of us would profess any
desire to live in a society where the government, on the basis of
undocumented allegations by known criminals, went around testing its
citizens to determine their propensity to commit manufactured crimes. Or in
a society where a prosecutor, hired to investigate one set of allegations,
is given carte blanche to look into just about any character weaknesses
that happen to interest him.

Fortunately, most of us do not have to live under those rules. We have
chosen in the past 20 years to apply them to only one class of people: the
people we elect to public office.

We have done that, I suppose, out of a well-meaning societal belief that
these officials shouldn't just be morally equivalent to the rest of us,
they should be better than we are.

They are entrusted with the public welfare, and in return they should be
held to the loftiest possible standard of conduct, not the standard of
ordinary human weakness. If upholding the highest standard requires some
deceptive tactics that we would never want used on private citizens, then
so be it.

That's the theory. The reality, as we are learning in education, is that
higher standards don't necessarily guarantee higher performance.

We have representative government in this country, not only in the sense
that the people we elect mirror our preferences and values, but also in the
sense that they mirror our personal frailties. Exposing those frailties
with a hidden tape recorder does nothing in the end to improve the quality
of government's performance and, no matter how many politicians it
humiliates, it does not strengthen public confidence in government. It
corrodes it.

Recapturing healthy democracy in this country will require, among other
things, a public recognition that the government is not an alien force and
its officials are not alien creatures. They do not deserve special
privileges or special treatment, but neither do they deserve to be
subjected to an intrusiveness that would be considered manifestly unjust if
applied to the rest of us in private life.

In the absence of compelling evidence of misconduct, they should be left
alone to do their jobs, and then held accountable at election time.

I know this isn't what most reporters or syndicated columnists believe, or
what the federal judiciary believes. But it is what the jury in the Chicago
bribery case believed, and I think it is part of what the poll numbers on
President Clinton are trying to tell us.

Ehrenhalt is the Washington-based executive editor of Governing magazine
and the author, most recently, of The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of
Community in America.