Informant

An informant is a person who provides privileged information about a person or organization to an agency. The term is usually used within the law enforcement world, where they are officially known as confidential or criminal informants (CI), and can often refer pejoratively to the supply of information without the consent of the other parties with the intent of malicious, personal or financial gain. However, the term is used in politics, industry and academia.

Criminal informants

Informants are commonly found in the world of organized crime. By its very nature, organized crime involves many people who are aware of each other's guilt, in a variety of illegal activities. Quite frequently, confidential informants (or criminal informants) will provide information in order to obtain lenient treatment for themselves and provide information, over an extended period of time, in return for money or for police to overlook their own criminal activities. Quite often, someone will become an informant following their arrest.

Informant (psychiatry)

In psychiatry, an informant is someone who can report on a case without causing observer effects. For example, informants may be family members or friends of a psychiatric patient. Informants are particularly important when the patient's lucidity is questionable; for example, in cases of dementia, or when the patient is a child.

Data collected from informants must be used with caution, because informants are rarely in a position to provide completely accurate information. In such cases, it is necessary to interview multiple informants and combine the data. Further compounding the difficulty, informants may also suffer from conditions themselves, which makes them more likely to describe others as having the informant's condition. It is not clear whether this makes them more or less objective than healthy informants.

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Informant (disambiguation)

An informant is a person provides privileged information to an agency.

Informant may also refer to:

See also