
“By the evening of her death, Rachel Hoffman had been working for the police department for almost three weeks. In bureaucratic terms, she was Confidential Informant No. 1129, or C.I. Hoffman. In legal parlance, she was a ‘coöperator,’ one of thousands of people who, each year, help the police build cases against others, often in exchange for a promise of leniency in the criminal-justice system. Informants are the foot soldiers in the government’s war on drugs. By some estimates, up to eighty per cent of all drug cases in America involve them, often in active roles like Hoffman’s.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_stillman?currentPage=all
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