The practice, named after a 1990 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, has helped prosecutors close hundreds of murder cases across the state. But defense attorneys, civil rights groups and a growing number of appellate judges argue the tactic has been stretched well beyond its original intent — particularly in cases where suspects had already invoked their right to remain silent.

A months-long investigation by CalMatters, drawing on more than 5,000 pages of court records and over 40 interviews with attorneys, scholars, lawmakers and people who were subject to the operations, offers the most detailed public accounting yet of how these stings work and who they target. Here’s what the review found.

A murky legal standing

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that statements suspects make to undercover jailhouse operatives are considered voluntary, meaning police aren’t required to read Miranda warnings before deploying an agent. But that decision left unresolved a key question now working through California’s courts: whether investigators can keep running these operations after a suspect has already asserted their Miranda rights during an earlier interrogation.

The state’s high court declined to take up a related case in 2019 involving a Kern County man who was targeted by an undercover operative just one day after invoking his rights. Even so, Justice Goodwin Liu wrote a pointed dissent, warning that deceptive tactics used to bypass Miranda protections had become widespread across California law enforcement. “How is it possible,” he asked, “that the protections of Miranda are so easily evaded?”

How the operations unfold

According to court records reviewed by CalMatters, the undercover operatives — often called Perkins agents — are typically older and more physically imposing than the suspects they’re paired with. Many pose as seasoned, high-ranking gang members with violent reputations. In some documented cases, jail officials placed as many as five agents in a cell with a single target.

Martín Flores, a gang expert who has studied these operations extensively, said the goal for many detainees becomes proving themselves to the undercover agent, largely out of self-preservation. “If you look weak and vulnerable, you’re going to become the prey,” he said.

Records show jail cells wired with hidden recording equipment, substantial payments made to operatives, and staged evidence designed to prompt suspects into talking.

Scrutiny across Southern California

CalMatters identified Perkins operations conducted in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, Orange, Santa Barbara and Santa Clara counties. Riverside County’s first documented operation dates to 2014, and records show its law enforcement agencies now run several such stings weekly — roughly half of them on behalf of outside agencies whose identities were not disclosed.

Earlier this year, the 4th District Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of a Riverside County man, who has consistently maintained his innocence, after finding investigators violated his rights by continuing an operation after he had invoked his right to counsel. The court ruled that once a suspect invokes and does not waive that right, continued efforts by law enforcement to “stimulate” conversation through an operation amount to an unlawful custodial interrogation — making any resulting statements inadmissible.

Questions of racial bias

Of the cases now before the California Supreme Court, four defendants are Hispanic, four are Black and two are white; the youngest was just 18 at the time of the operation.

The California Public Defenders Association and the ACLU have urged the court to examine whether the practice disproportionately affects people of color. They point to an analysis by the Riverside County Public Defender’s Office of roughly 880 murder cases from January 2015 through June 2023, which found Black defendants were targeted in Perkins operations at more than four times the rate of white defendants, while Latino defendants were targeted at twice the rate.

In San Diego County, public defenders have filed the state’s first Racial Justice Act petition connected to a Perkins operation, a law that allows defendants to challenge convictions they believe were tainted by racial bias. Their review of roughly 40 operations found agents repeatedly used racial slurs and leaned on cultural stereotypes to build false trust with suspects.

San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan pushed back on those findings, telling CalMatters that the operations are used consistently “wherever it appears that a heartless murder can benefit,” regardless of a suspect’s race, gender or background.

A veil of secrecy

Law enforcement agencies have been notably resistant to releasing information about how Perkins operations are funded, staffed and trained. CalMatters filed nearly two dozen public records requests with agencies in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino, Orange and Santa Clara counties — almost all of which were denied.

It wasn’t until attorneys from the law firm Covington & Burling, working with the First Amendment Coalition, pressed the issue over several months that a limited set of records was ultimately released, offering a rare glimpse into a practice that has otherwise remained largely hidden from public view.

Original source: CalMatters

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An analysis of racial disparities in urban air pollution reveals starker differences than previously understood in the communities where most Americans live. Compared to earlier studies, researchers found more substantial increases in concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) comparing census tracts with no Black residents with census tracts with a small percent of Black residents. The findings are published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Scientists at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and partners modeled census tract level PM2.5 concentrations using a nonlinear method that accounts for poverty and population density using data from 2010. The nonlinear method allows for the relationship between race/ethnicity and air pollution to change across communities.

“Much research has documented racial disparities but in communities at the tail of the distribution, such as where a community is 80 percent Black. We see this disparity begin when just a few Black individuals enter a community, meaning we see an immediate disparity in communities where most Americans live,” says senior author Joan Casey, PhD, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman School.

The researchers found that the standard linear method underestimated the severity of air pollution in areas with low percentages of Black residents. Using the new nonlinear method, the difference in PM2.5 concentrations between an area without any Black residents and 10 percent Black residents is +1.1 µg/m3 of PM2.5 versus a difference of +0.09 µg/m3 in the linear model. The linear method also seems to overestimate the severity of air pollution in areas with high percentages of white residents. Using the nonlinear method, the difference in air pollution concentrations between an area with 80 percent vs. 90 percent white is -0.47 µg/m3 of PM2.5 vs. -0.17 µg/m3 in the linear model.

These differences are important because even a 1 µg/m3 increase in PM2.5 can increase risk of numerous health outcomes including adverse birth outcomes and cardiovascular disease. The larger than previously recognized disparities in air pollution where most Americans live may have implications for persistent racial health disparities in the United States.

The researchers’ use of this method was informed by their understanding of how historical sociopolitical processes differently impacted neighborhoods with small vs. large non-white populations.

First author Misbath Daouda, a PhD candidate in environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, says: “History shows that even a relatively small Black population can set-off racist practices that restrict where these individuals can live and work, which can lead to additional exposure to environmental hazards like air pollution. For instance, a slight relative increase of the Black population in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early 1900s led to the implementation of a racially restrictive zoning ordinance in 1926, which resulted in the least desirable and most hazard-prone land in the city being zoned for Black residence. In 2010, Black Americans were about twice as likely to live in areas where PM2.5 concentrations exceeded the 90th percentile nationwide than white and Hispanic Americans.”

Co-authors include Lucas Henneman, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia; and Jeff Goldsmith and Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou at Columbia Mailman School.

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The findings add to a growing body of evidence that even when police are tasked with activities outside traditional law enforcement, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, the results reflect similar patterns of racialized criminalization and punishment. The results are published in the journal Critical Public Health.

“In addition to the potential for direct physical harm as a result of these police stops, the use of police to enforce public health mandates could be especially dangerous during an infectious disease pandemic,” said Sandhya Kajeepeta, a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School, and first author. “NYPD officers have reported high rates of infection and have low mask-wearing compliance themselves. Thus, police stops, which involve forced close physical interactions, increase the risk of COVID spread.”


The researchers focused on summonses and arrests related to the enforcement of COVID-19 mandates in New York City from March 12-May 24, 2020, obtained from the NYC Open Data portal. The researchers also integrated cell phone data and 311 data as ZIP-code-level measures of social distancing compliance, making this the first study to use both 311 service requests and non-home dwell time via cell phone data as two control measures of social distancing behavior. The researchers also tabulated ZIP code area-level demographic measures from the 2018 American Community Survey including the percentages of residents self-identifying as Black and the percentage of residents with an income below the federal poverty level.


After adjusting for the two control measures of social distancing behavior, a standard deviation increase in the percentage of Black residents was associated with a 73 percent increase in the COVID-19-specific summons rate and a 34 percent increase in the public health and nuisance arrest rate (which includes arrests for charges such as disorderly conduct and criminal trespass). A standard deviation increase in the percentage below the poverty level was associated with a 50 percent increase in the public health and nuisance arrest rate.

“Our findings support the argument that whenever we expand the role of police to address social problems or public health problems, what we get is more policing,” said Seth Prins, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia Mailman, and senior author. “Regardless of what we ask the police to do, what they’re likely to do is target Black people and poor people. Specifically, police enforcement of COVID-19 mandates not only reproduced patterns of racist and classist policing and jail incarceration. It also likely increased the spread of COVID-19, by putting people unable to comply with public health directives in danger of coronavirus exposure in jails, where transmission rates are extremely high. After being released from these high-exposure settings, people returned home to communities already disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Furthermore, police enforcement of these mandates likely exacerbated economic precarity in an environment of mass unemployment and underemployment,” he added.

The researchers point out that some COVID-19-related police stops were violent in nature, placing individuals at risk of physical harm. For example, videos have shown NYPD officers arresting a mother and forcing her to the ground in front of her child for purportedly wearing a mask improperly and officers kneeling on the neck of a man during a social distancing arrest.

“Beyond the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the over-policing of Black communities has had harmful public health consequences,” said Kajeepeta. “A growing body of research shows that living in a neighborhood with a high rate of police stops is associated with higher rates of poor health outcomes like anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and even asthma. This research also suggests that these effects can be more pronounced among Black residents than white residents, thereby potentially producing and exacerbating racialized health inequities.”

While the summonses and many of the arrests analyzed in this study occurred in the name of public health, the findings suggest that tasking police to enforce public health mandates may have contributed to the reproduction of over-policing of Black communities and the dangers to health and safety that practice poses. This body of evidence has implications beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that using policing as a tool for social service provision or public health promotion in any context risks perpetuating racialized criminalization and exacerbating racialized health inequities.

Co-authors are Emilie Bruzelius, Columbia Mailman School; and Jessica Ho, Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

The study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, grant DA045955.

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