Sting operation

Naval Criminal Investigative Service preparations for an ecstasy sting

In law enforcement, a sting operation is a deceptive operation designed to catch a person committing a crime. A typical sting will have an undercover law enforcement officer, detective, or co-operative member of the public play a role as criminal partner or potential victim and go along with a suspect's actions to gather evidence of the suspect's wrongdoing. Mass media journalists occasionally resort to sting operations to record video and broadcast to expose criminal activity.^[1]

Sting operations are common in many countries, such as the United States,^[2] but they are not permitted in some countries, such as Sweden or France.^[3]

Examples

• Deploying a bait car (also called a honey trap) to catch a car thief
• Setting up a seemingly vulnerable honeypot computer to lure and gain information about hackers
• Arranging for someone under the legal drinking age to ask an adult to buy an alcoholic beverage or tobacco products for them^[4]
• Passing off explosives (whether fake or real), to a would-be terror bomber
• Posing as...
  • someone who is seeking illegal drugs, contraband, or child pornography, to catch a supplier (or as a supplier to catch a customer)
  • a child in a chat room to identify a potential child molester
  • a potential customer of illegal prostitution, or as a prostitute to catch a customer
  • a hitman to catch customers and solicitors of murder-for-hire; or as a customer to catch a hitman
  • a spectator of an illegal dog fighting ring

Ethical and legal concerns

Sting operations are fraught with ethical concerns over whether they constitute entrapment. Law-enforcement may have to be careful not to provoke the commission of a crime by someone who would not otherwise have done so. Additionally, in the process of such operations, the police often engage in the same crimes, such as buying or selling contraband, soliciting prostitutes, etc. In common law jurisdictions, the defendant may invoke the defense of entrapment.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, however, entrapment does not prohibit undercover police officers from posing as criminals or denying that they are police.^[5] Entrapment is typically a defense only when suspects are pressured into being implicated in a crime they would probably not have committed otherwise, but the legal definition of this pressure varies greatly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

For example, if undercover officers coerced a potential suspect into manufacturing illegal drugs to sell them, the accused could use entrapment as a defense. However, if a suspect is already manufacturing drugs and police pose as buyers to catch them, entrapment usually has not occurred.

Sting operations in popular culture

The term "sting" was popularized by the 1973 Robert Redford and Paul Newman movie The Sting, though the film is not about a police operation: it features two grifters and their attempts to con a mob boss out of a large sum of money.

In 1998, three agencies joined forces to conduct a sting operation where they successfully recovered the Honduras Goodwill Moon Rock from a vault in Miami. The sting operation was known as "Operation Lunar Eclipse" and the participating agencies were NASA Office of Inspector General, the United States Postal Inspection Service and U.S. Customs. The moon rock was offered to the undercover agents for $5 million. Journalist Christina Reed broke that story in Geotimes in 2002.^[6][7] Operation Lunar Eclipse and the Moon Rock Project were the subject of the book The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks by Joe Kloc.

See also

• Advance-fee scam
• The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks
• Edison divorce torture plot
• Fence (criminal)
• Honey trapping
• Honeypot (computing)
• Informant
• List of scholarly publishing stings
• Mr. Big (police procedure)
• Murder of Rachel Hoffman, the execution of a police informant during a sting operation
• Narada Sting Operation
• Possession of stolen goods
• Stephen Joseph Ratkai, arrested and convicted of espionage in Canada after a successful sting operation

Notes

External links

• Spencer Ackerman: Government agents 'directly involved' in most high-profile US terror plots. Human Rights Watch documents 'sting' operations. Report raises questions about post-9/11 civil rights, The Guardian, 21 July 2014.