By Duni Heimpel

On the night of April 8, 2004, San Francisco police officer Kevin Healy stumbled down Mission Street with the intent of luring someone into robbing him. Dressed in dingy clothes, Healy careened through the night as if drunk, $5 and $20 bills dangling obviously from his shirt pocket. Nearby lurked another half-dozen undercover officers.

As intended, Healy was jacked. Of the three people arrested that night, one was released on a technicality, another spent the better part of a year in jail, and the third is facing his third strike.

The San Francisco Police Department portrays its secret agents as heroes. Critics are less enthusiastic about the undercover operations. And it's easy to wonder whether the SFPD should even be running these types of missions at a time when it has a backlog of unsolved homicides, a shortage of cops on the streets, and diminishing funding.

Decoys are sent to "hot spots," SFPD spokesperson Maria Oropeza told the Bay Guardian. "The people that the decoys get are predators," Capt. James Hettrich said. "The criminals are very similar to a lion in a jungle looking at the herd and singling out the weakest one. They are like laughing hyenas. They are looking for elderly people or people with psychological problems."

Decoy operations range from planting an unlocked bike to sending out a scantily clad officer to act like a prostitute to having an officer walk down Mission Street at night with money hanging from his pocket.

"Proactive policing is a positive thing," Malaika Parker of Bay Area PoliceWatch told us. "But tricking people into committing a crime is not a great way of stopping crime before it happens."

Whether decoy activity crosses the line into entrapment depends on the behavior of the officer, according to California's jury instructions. If the officer simply gives the defendant an opportunity to commit a crime, it's not entrapment, but if the officer insists or coaxes the defendant, it is.

The distinction can be nebulous. As Susan Rutberg, professor of criminal law at Golden Gate University, pointed out, "Entrapment is in the eye of the beholder."

Rose Braz of Critical Resistance, an Oakland-based group that tracks trends in policing and incarceration, sees the decoy program as a misuse of scarce policing funds and a way for people to get sucked into the criminal justice system. Once jailed, they're likely to be jailed again. The recidivism rate for robbers stands at nearly 41 percent in the first year after release from prison and almost 57 during the second, according to the California Department of Corrections.

Rutberg sees an obvious correlation. "Jail is like a school of crime."

As far as the fiscal issue goes, the way the department charts its expenditures makes it tough to tell just how much money the SFPD spends on decoys annually. Hettrich did say that Healy runs such operations two or three times a month and that across the department, decoy operations are carried out an average of three times a week.

This much is clear, though: at this point, the cash-strapped department is short some 252 officers. And a large number of last year's 88 homicides remain unsolved.

Other city departments are also cutting crime-fighting initiatives. In mid-January, the San Francisco Department of Aging and Adult Services axed its senior escort service – a program that teamed elders with escorts to keep them from being robbed – because of a lack of funds.

As for the people who tried to rob Healy, they seem more like petty criminals than hardcore offenders. One, Edward Hurtado, was homeless and on crutches at the time; another was nearly homeless, dwelling in a residential hotel.

While Hurtado's case was dismissed because the courts failed to provide him with a speedy trial, the other two defendants, Crystal Carlson and Gregory McClain, are facing some serious jail time.

The police report says McClain draped his arm around Healy while Carlson tried to lift the money from his pocket. Police said Carlson then pushed Healy to the ground. Meanwhile Hurtado hobbled over to Healy and allegedly made a grab at the money but was pushed off. The physical nature of the robbery made it a felony, and thus it could count as a strike under the state's draconian Three Strikes law.

Carlson served 266 days in the county jail before being released on her own recognizance Dec. 29, 2004. She apparently fled, missing a January court date, and is wanted on a $10,000 warrant.

McClain, responsible for a string of crimes dating back to his first arrest for robbery in 1998, faces his third strike – and the potential of life in prison. His trial began Feb. 22. Court rules bar jurors from knowing about his previous crimes – which means if they convict him for the crime of falling for an easy-mark decoy, they may well be consigning him to a life behind bars without even knowing it.

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