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There is enough crime going on that we don't need the police creating crimes out of whole cloth to pad their stats. But that's exactly what the FBI did in 2012 when its informants committed some 5,939 crimes. I should probably point out that these were the crimes the FBI's informants were authorized to commit during the course of the year.

That marked an increase from the 5,658 times FBI informants broke the law in 2011.

Of course these figures don't include all of the fun that DEA and ATFE informants got to have on the government's dime since they choose not to publish that information.

I'm probably preaching to the choir, but if the police are breaking the law in order to arrest folks, then we have some serious questions we need to be asking. The job of the police is to protect and defend the citizenry. It's not to allow folks to commit crimes with their approval in order to catch someone else doing something they shouldn't be doing.

Yes, I get it. Police work can be like making sausage. Most of us probably don't want to know too many details of what goes on behind the scenes. It might make us question the bearings of our moral compasses. It might also make it that much harder to walk around with a holier than thou attitude.
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Then there's that whole philosophical angle -- is a person really committing a crime if the criminal act is set up by the police and there is absolutely no chance that the act will be completed?