I wasn’t so much proposing hiring five professional actors; rather, doing what police forces themselves do to set up a sting — finding five FBI officers that all happen to look similar, cleaning them up to look even more similar to one-another, training them in espionage / counter-counter-intelligence techniques, and then phrasing the BOLO in such a way that it avoids mentioning their differences.
> potentially expose them to bodily harm, the legal consequences if something go wrong
Presume that the FBI is staking out the police building and has (compelled) the cooperation of the local sheriff, in exactly the same way white-hat social-engineering pen-testers work in cooperation with the management of the organizations they attempt to penetrate. Presume also that, unknown to the police, no real suspects are being simultaneously processed (all have been redirected to other neighbouring precincts) and so all police suppression equipment has been swapped out for non-working versions. (If you try to taze or shoot the suspect, you lose.)
To be clear, this is a setup that already happens when there is an officer under FBI suspicion of being complicit/involved in criminal activity. The FBI comes in and works with the precinct to set up an internal sting. The only difference, here, is that this involves all the officers of the precinct, rather than just one.
> potentially expose them to bodily harm, the legal consequences if something go wrong
Presume that the FBI is staking out the police building and has (compelled) the cooperation of the local sheriff, in exactly the same way white-hat social-engineering pen-testers work in cooperation with the management of the organizations they attempt to penetrate. Presume also that, unknown to the police, no real suspects are being simultaneously processed (all have been redirected to other neighbouring precincts) and so all police suppression equipment has been swapped out for non-working versions. (If you try to taze or shoot the suspect, you lose.)
To be clear, this is a setup that already happens when there is an officer under FBI suspicion of being complicit/involved in criminal activity. The FBI comes in and works with the precinct to set up an internal sting. The only difference, here, is that this involves all the officers of the precinct, rather than just one.