Imagine the following scenario: A police officer is investigating a major drug trafficking ring. She obtains a wiretap on the cell phone of the suspected kingpin of the organization. The wiretap enables her to overhear conversations between the top target of the wiretap and several other people in the drug ring. Before the wiretap produces sufficient evidence to support arrest and prosecution of the kingpin, it yields evidence of various crimes involving lower-level drug runners.

Traditionally, this officer would face a dilemma. On the one hand, she could arrest the low-level targets based on the evidence she had already obtained, but in the course of prosecuting them she would be forced to reveal the existence of the wiretap to these low-level targets, who would likely inform the kingpin, which would likely prevent her from obtaining any additional evidence against her top target. Alternatively, she could sit idly by while known criminal activity occurred, perhaps at immediate risk to the safety of the community, in order to keep the wiretap secret and continue building her case against the kingpin.

The “hand off” is a law enforcement technique that seeks to resolve this dilemma by enabling what I will call “midstream prosecutions.” A hand off occurs when information from an initial investigation such as a wiretap is “handed off” from one police unit to another. The receiving unit conducts a subsequent and so-called independent investigation, and the subsequent investigation becomes the basis of a criminal prosecution during which the initial investigation is never revealed to the defendant or to the court. The hand off therefore allows police to conduct midstream prosecutions during ongoing covert investigations without “blowing their cover.”