Source: Police eye teen as author of anti-snitching site

Philadelphia police have identified a 17-year-old who they believe is behind an anonymous Instagram page that for months identified witnesses in violent crimes across the city in an effort to "expose rats," law enforcement sources said Friday.

The sources did not name the teenager, but say they suspect he outed more than 30 witnesses in dozens of cases on an Instagram account called rats 215.

Before it was shut down Thursday night, the account regularly posted photos, police statements, and witness testimony on the photo-sharing website.

"It's, in my opinion, witness intimidation," Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said Friday. "It's flat-out wrong. And [the account holder] could be criminally responsible for intimidating witnesses, if that's the case."

Many of the documents on the page are not public records, raising questions about where the account holder obtained them.

Officials were still trying to answer that questions as a warrant was being prepared Friday night for the 17-year-old's arrest.

Bradley S. Bridge, a senior attorney at the city Public Defender's Office, said his office's policy was to provide witness statements to clients as long as they requested the material in writing.

While the names of witnesses are redacted in the public records, his lawyers can give defendants' statements that include witnesses' names, Bridge said. That, he said, is because the accused have a constitutional right to confront witnesses who testify against them.

Sometimes these statements make it back to the street, a phenomenon police say dates back years.

"This has always been prevalent in neighborhoods, this paperwork out there flowing," Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said.

But social media allow criminals to "go beyond the block," spreading witness statements - their "paperwork" - to untold numbers of Internet users, Bethel said.

While police are still investigating the source of the documents posted on rats 215, one made it out of the courthouse from a secret grand jury proceeding - designed to be a bulwark against rampant witness intimidation in city courts.

That case involved a 2012 attempted shooting in which a 19-year-old Southwest Philadelphia man told police he was targeted because he had testified in an earlier homicide case.

One official with knowledge of the case said the documents were made public after a "string of errors" on the part of prosecutors and defense attorneys.

The source said a prosecutor did not realize material from that case was considered secret - grand jury material does not have to be turned over to defense attorneys until two months before a trial.

The prosecutor turned documents over several months early, the source said.

Then, the source said, the public defender in the case wrongly believed he could share those documents with his client.

It was unclear how the documents made their way onto rats 215.

None of those inadvertent errors, the source stressed, excused the actions of whoever posted the documents on Instagram.

Bridge said his office would investigate "to determine if anything that our office did was inappropriate."

Tasha Jamerson, a spokeswoman for the District Attorney's Office, said she could not comment.

Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart, the chief supervising judge of Philadelphia's indicting grand jury program, said that about 600 cases had been presented to indicting grand juries since the program began in 2012, and that this was the first instance of evidence leaving the secret proceedings.

"I don't want the public to get the idea that this is a leaking ship," Minehart said. "The District Attorney's Office is doing their job and monitoring the process. Something slipped through, and now we have to tighten the ship."

Walter M. Phillips Jr., chairman of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency and a key advocate for indicting grand juries, said leaks are "unfortunate" but not unexpected.

"Nothing is totally foolproof in this world," he said.

Those who breach grand jury secrecy can face contempt of court charges, he said.

Everett Gillison, Mayor Nutter's chief of staff, said the city was taking all the cases posted on rats 215 "extremely seriously."

"We are investigating this account and the people we find on this account," he said, "and we will do whatever we can to bring to justice those seeking to do harm to witnesses or undermine our criminal justice system."

The mother of one young man whose statements were posted on rats 215 said her son learned he had been outed this summer "on that snitching site," but insisted neither she nor he was worried.

"People," she said, "are going to talk and do what they want."

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@MikeNewall