A California police department’s use of a fake news release in an anti-gang operation has drawn warnings that the tactic undermines police and threatens trust with the public.

Santa Maria police chief Ralph Martin defended the tactic last week, saying it was necessary to protect the lives of two men from a gang that wanted to kill them.

The fictional news release was found in court documents last week by the Santa Maria Sun, nearly 10 months after the local paper and television stations had reported the story as fact. Police had said officers had detained two cousins, 22-year-old Jose Santos Melendez and 23-year-old Jose Marino Melendez, on charges of identity theft and had given the men to immigration authorities.



The police had lied. For weeks, the department had been running a surveillance operation on a gang called MS-13, with active wiretaps. Listening to MS-13 conversations, the police learned that the Melendez cousins, members of a rival gang, were targeted for murders. Detectives took the cousins into protective custody, removing them from their home where the men and their family might have been targeted by the hitmen.

As a cover, the police wrote a fake news release to deceive the MS-13 assassins. When the would-be killers returned to look for the cousins, police eavesdropped on a phone conversation and heard the hitmen talking about local news reports of the arrests.

Martin said that the investigation, called Operation Matador, was able to continue thanks to the ruse, and that police eventually arrested 17 gang members on charges related to 10 murders. The police chief told the Associated Press he would not rule out fabricating another story to protect lives and investigations.

“It was a moral and ethical decision, and I stand by it,” Martin said. “I am keenly aware and sensitive to the community and the media. I also had 21 bodies lying in the city in the last 15 months.”

But press experts and ethicists warned that Martin’s argument of a greater good was outweighed by the damage the fake report did. The Santa Maria police may have threatened their standing – and their ability to do their work – in a practical sense, said Greg Leslie, the legal defense director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

“This immediately and almost permanently undermines the credibility of an entire police department,” he said. “Not only in the eyes of the public, but even the gang members won’t believe them in the future.”

“It’s worrying,” he added. “Who’s going to believe a police department statement about the status of anyone in custody or about who’s been arrested for a crime? A reporter might have to say, ‘The police say they have someone in custody, but they have been known to falsify information in the past.’”

It’s worrying. Who’s going to believe a police department statement about the status of anyone in custody? Greg Leslie, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

Police officers sometimes pose as reporters to get information from sources, but rarely do law enforcement operations hinge on fabricated reports. In 2014 the FBI was sharply criticized, though it did not break the law, for creating a fake Associated Press story to investigate a teenager who had made bomb threats.

More often, law enforcement officials will post fake prizes and lures to bait suspects with outstanding warrants into public places, where officers can then arrest them. But those snares do not usually dupe the press and make reporters into unwitting accomplices, said Jeffrey Seglin, an ethicist at the Harvard Kennedy School.

“People have done stuff like this before to get criminals to show up to police departments, lures to get people to come in for free lottery tickets,” he said. “But I don’t know anything that’s gone this far.”

“That’s trying to get the criminals to believe something. This is different: it misleads the press and the public. It erodes trust in everything, right?”

Seglin said that although the police had thought about ethics – “they didn’t just make a knee-jerk, gut reaction” – he did not think the decision was ethical.

Kelly McBride, a vice-president for the Poynter Institute, said the fake press release undermines trust in the police department and “sends a message to the officers in this department that falsifying information is OK if you have a good reason. That’s antithetical to the principles of law enforcement.”

“These are people who often have to testify that they are telling the truth,” she said. The police, she added, “achieved an important good for two people, and sacrificed the greater good for the citizens they serve.”

Martin was not immediately available for an interview but said last week that he was unshaken by the criticism. “I think if they were in my shoes they would have done the same thing,” he said.

•This story has been corrected to reflect that the Santa Maria Sun broke the initial story of the fake news release