Social Engineering with a Badge

[Rhydderch Hael]

This article showed up in the local cage-liner today:

PALMDALE - Four women were arrested Friday on grand theft charges in a sting operation set up to determine whether individuals would turn in a bag or wallet containing $400 to Antelope Valley Mall personnel or law enforcement officials.
However, some of the women believe they were wrongly arrested and never given the chance to hand over the bag or wallet to authorities.

"They were given the opportunity to turn in the property," said Deputy Charles Lemke of the Palmdale Sheriff's Station. "There is no particular prescribed method in how we do it."

Individuals were arrested if they picked up the property and tried to conceal it or didn't immediately turn it over to authorities, who Lemke said were walking around the mall during Friday's sting operation.

An armed uniformed deputy or security guard, he said, walked up and stood next to the individuals who picked up the wallet.

"They made themselves very known," Lemke said.

...The operation was the second of its kind, he said. Supported by mall security and personnel, it was conducted by the sheriff's station's Partners for a Better Palmdale deputies to determine if individuals misappropriated found property or committed grand theft, Lemke said.

"We are trying to make the mall a safer place for everybody," he said. "We want people to have a conscience to turn in property to the proper authorities."

Incidental observation of a crime being committed and making an arrest from that is one thing (an important thing called "probable cause", I imagine) but deliberately setting up a situation to arrest anyone who reacts disfavorably to your action reeks of entrapment to me. And if the second paragraph I quoted suggests that this was an exercise to educate people that they better be angels (or else!), then why use a wallet with $400 as bait instead of one carrying considerably less? Oh, because they wanted to press Grand Theft charges on the offenders.

I'd be happy with the idea that police are there to catch people who haven't learned their "Sunday-school" lessons, so to speak. I'm less than happy that they'd take up the job of teaching folks that lesson through false circumstances, punctuated by very real consequences.