‘No Snitching’: What Happens When Communities Stop Trusting Police
Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood has long been a haven for gang violence and gun crimes. But the community’s response to a recent shooting calls attention to a two-word phrase that has compromised public safety and cost countless lives: Stop snitchin’.
On Saturday, a 2-year-old girl was shot in Roxbury, marking the fourth shooting in 10 days, according to the Boston Globe. Her father, a suspected gang member, is thought to have been the original target.
Speaking to the Globe, the Rev. Miriam E. Sedzro, who pastors a local Lutheran church, said that “[p]eople have to talk” to police, instead of letting “predators prey on a community.”
“This ‘no snitching’ makes no sense to me …,” Sedzro said. “The way you create a community is you work together. You watch out for each other. You don’t let the criminals intimidate you.”
The “stop snitchin’” code goes back decades in America, illuminating the chronic police-community divide and mistrust. In 2005, then-mayor Thomas Menino infamously started a P.R. war against the widely circulating “Stop Snitchin’” T-shirts in Boston, which he believed discouraged witnesses from reporting crimes by instilling fear. Before this, other high-crime east coast cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore had launched their own wars against so-called snitches.
Brenda Peoples, the grandmother of the 2-year-old Roxbury girl who was wounded over the weekend, told the Globe that Saturday’s shooting exposed her to the consequences of remaining silent:
“She wants her community to speak up for her granddaughter. Peoples abides by a motto she learned working for the [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority]: If you see something, say something. She believes this is the only way anyone will be caught, the only way to stop the violence.”
“I wish the young people, the youth around here, would take life a little more seriously,” Peoples said. “This retaliation thing … it’s back and forth, back and forth. She’s going to be 3 in January. She doesn’t have any sense of all this [violence] going down.”
This is the type of story that the mainstream media won’t cover because it shows how a widespread lack of trust in local law enforcement can actually lead to more crime. Today, people are told that “systematic racism” and “institutional bias” within law enforcement are the biggest threats facing minorities in inner-cities. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine have used this argument to justify federal intervention in community affairs.
When enmity exists between police and citizens, communities suffer. Roxbury is just one example of this. When anti-cop hatred and mistrust bar police from doing their job, “predators” — be they gangs or the DOJ — will step in to claim that authority. (For more from the author of “‘No Snitching’: What Happens When Communities Stop Trusting Police” please click HERE)
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