Informants Information is the currency that criminal investigators deal in. Information is needed to solve crimes and lock up criminals. The best information comes from honest citizens providing the truth to the police to make their community a safer place. This information comes from victims of crimes and alert witnesses of crimes or suspicious behavior. Informants are another source of information. Informants can make an investigator look like a hero when they provide good information, but they're typically rather needy and difficult to handle. Informants come from all walks of life. In evaluating an informant, the wise investigator must first try to understand what is motivating a person to become an informant. The best and most altruistic informants are trying to clean up their neighborhood or workplace or just want a bad person off the street. Other informants use the police to exact revenge against someone who angered them. This sort of informant knows something about another person and is going to teach that person a lesson. Sometimes, drug dealers will even give information against rival drug dealers in an effort to get police to eliminate the competition.
Mercenary informants will wait until there is a large reward to come forward with information. There is a danger of diminishing returns when the reward money used to solve crimes and becomes more than several thousand dollars. The problem with huge rewards is that many mercenary informants will try to play “tip lotto.” In this little “game” the informant just thinks of someone shifty in the area and gives the police that name. The strategy here is the mercenary may get lucky, and the person named might actually have done the crime. If they gave the right name to the police, they can then claim the reward when the crook is arrested. The mercenary tipster figures the odds are way better than the real