Editorial: OC snitch scandal shows police can’t police themselves

In the second century AD, poet Juvenal penned the now-famous Latin saying, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, which translates as “Who will watch the watchers?” Societies rely on police and prosecutors to monitor the citizenry, but who will monitor them? As we see repeatedly, our own nation’s law enforcement typically oversees itself with far less zeal than it does the general public.

We can find a useful but disturbing local example. Beginning around 2007, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department “violated the Sixth Amendment by using jailhouse informants to elicit incriminating statements from people who had been arrested, after those individuals had been charged with a crime,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice. 

A new investigation from The Orange County Register’s Tony Saavedra finds the “taint” from the scandal continues to impact the justice system. One legal expert wonders “why more isn’t being done to examine all the informant cases” handled by the past district attorney and prosecutors who were caught up in the scandal. 

The answer, from Harvard Law Professor Alexandra Natapoff: “Law enforcement and prosecutors have strong incentives to suppress information and many powerful tools at their disposal with which to do so.” Other interviewed legal scholars note the obvious conflict of interest of having a DA’s office investigate itself — and wonder about the lack of an independent investigation.

The feds filed their report eight years after it was discovered by the public defender’s office, but dropped their oversight in 2025. They stepped in after the California attorney general quietly dropped a four-year investigation in 2019. The DA’s office and sheriff’s department issued a few wrist slaps, but police agencies are remarkably slow-moving in these internal matters.

Current DA Todd Spitzer, who highlighted the scandal during his run for office, assured the Register that his office is reviewing the cases despite a lack of funding. After all these years, however, it’s hard to believe justice will ever be served. That shouldn’t surprise us. When the watchers watch themselves, not a lot of watching goes on.