« Storm of a Century | Main | Cheney on Geneva » Start Snitchin'27 May 2007 02:46 pm I got to meet Corey Booker last week. He seemed like a nice guy. People should help him out and cooperate with the police. Actually, I really was quite surprised that I met him at a UNITE-HERE event. I didn't actually know anything about the man, but judging by his fan base I had formed this impression of him as a wanker who wouldn't be attending somewhat obscure union functions. Comments (28)
Why would I cooperate with criminals? 
Sorry Matt. People enjoy life too much themselves to put targets on their backs by providing information that may or may not lead to a conviction against a guy who'll probably get shot next week anyway.
You'll love this website...
Petey, I'm strongly against snitching on harmless stuff (smoking pot, downloading some MP3s you wouldn't have bought anyway). But I'm not against snitching on murderers, because killing people is a really bad thing and it needs to be stopped.
Corey Booker, a wanker? He's a real African American high-achiever with more executive experience than Barack Obama. And he's well positioned for a solid political career. The key will be for him to move on to another office (state assembly or senate?) after one term as mayor of Newark. That way, he'll get credit for the dead cat bounce in Newark and the juxtaposition with his corrupt predecessor Sharpe James, but he won't be there long enough to get the blame if Newark never attracts a critical mass of Williamsburg-types to gentrify.
Is anyone keeping track of the posts in which Matt advises us of his ignorance before telling us what we should think? He's surprised to meet Corey Booker at a UNITE-HERE event? How the hell can a reform politician get elected and govern in Newark without the support of honest and progressive unions?
Corey Booker is awsome.
It's hard for some to understand why, but there is a reason why certain people would rather die than work with the police in their neighborhoods in any way. Personally, I have been persecuted by the police in my town and in the neighboring suburbs throughout my teenage years (I am not a violent person and never have been, yet I am a felon and have been since age 18, for simple possession what else). In the largely Black, city, neighborhood where I stay the harsh reality I've been seeing here since birth (along with family roots that stretch back much longer) and memories (along with endless current examples) of horrible and destructive and racist police behaviour, I can simply not allow myself to turn another fellow resident over to the same folks who railroaded me (twice); I don't care what the person did (or is accused of doing), I see no benefit for anyone living here in cooperating. I cannot make others understand, but I can at least tell how I feel personally...
Wikipedia spells his name "Cory Booker." Normally, I would chalk this up to Matt's normally poor spelling, but everybody else has followed suit with Matt's "Corey Booker." Is Matt correct and Wikipedia incorrect? That seems hard to fathom.
Barbosa, I wonder if there's a counterargument to the 'broken windows' theory of policing in what you're saying. You don't want mild troublemakers to get into an antagonistic relationship with police where they won't cooperate or volunteer information if something serious happens. The war on drugs looks especially disastrous in this regard, as you suggest.
I agree with Neil. Too many of us here grew up watching our Uncles and others put relentlessly through the ringer (and sometimes even completely unjustified) harassment and jail or prison time for mistakes (or nothing at all). I live in a police state area. Right now the police are driving down my block and looking in EVERYONES' car (as they do nearly every day). I am not in the "game" in any way, however, I and everyone who lives here is subject to a constant state of harrassment, fear and hate of the local cops and their federal friends and the CI's who deal drugs with impunity while they advertise the fact that "they have a license and you do not". There has not beenn a murder on my block for almost a year and personally I think we should send the cops packing and deal with our own broken kids in our own way. There is no hope that the current police strategy here will EVER WORK, and I doubt if it will work elsewhere except maybe to move the "troublemakers" elsewhere.
Barbosa, Monroe Anderson just wrote a nice piece in the Chicago Sun-Times about this. Matt, I really like the stuff you write about foreign affairs, but you're totally missing the boat on why we have so much crime in our inner cities. The unwillingness for people in the black community to "snitch" on each other is not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that laws (mostly drug laws) that aren't enforced in white communities are enforced with intensity and alarming brute force in black communities. People who "snitch" and become informants just increase the amount of damage being done (and often get nothing for their efforts). That's why there's a backlash.
To get the obvious out of the way first: of course marijuana should be legalized, and of course there are significant problems with racism and especially classism in American society. The current model for the criminal justice system of retribution and incarceration instead of rehabilitation and treatment is a failure, as has been persuasively demonstrated by people like Elliott Currie. I even used to be totally convinced that nearly all drugs should be legalized, until I read a piece by Currie that created some doubts. But that is neither here nor there for the present discussion as far as I can tell. The NYT article to which Matt links documents that we aren't talking just about people informing the police of drug crimes. We are talking about people who refuse to divulge who shot them, or shot others as they stood by and watched. And the article also documents that much of the homicide rate is linked to the drug trade. So even if the police in a particular community are awful, or most drugs should be legalized, what argument does that constitute for refusing to identify a murderer? The choice here is not between cooperating with police, and a perfect world with no police brutality or where poor communities are given all of the resources they need to solve their own problems. That is obviously wishful thinking, and a case of the best being the enemy of the good. Between the live options of taking some step to reduce the murder rate however problematic, and doing nothing, I don't see how this is a debate. And all of this theorizing about the injustices of American society, though accurate, in this context only serves to obscure that basic reality. And why does Cory Booker want to crack down on the drug trade? Is it because he is a racist? Or could it be because his constituents desperately want a safer city, and know of the deep connection between violent crime and the drug trade? Pointing out the disparity between the enforcement of drug laws in white and black communities seems entirely beside the point. And I can tell you this much: if rich white kids doing heroin at my high school had had the same consequences for my community as the drug trade has had for Newark, I bet I would have a very different perspective on drug legalization. People are right to point out the historical explanation for why the norm against cooperating with police originated, just as you can look to the history of Sicily to see why the code of Omerta familiar from the Mafia originated. But to pretend that this norm is not completely dysfunctional for poor communities today is both foolish and tragic.
NGF, The NYT article to which Matt links documents that we aren't talking just about people informing the police of drug crimes. We are talking about people who refuse to divulge who shot them, or shot others as they stood by and watched. And the article also documents that much of the homicide rate is linked to the drug trade. Most of the homicides are certainly linked to the drug trade. As with alcohol prohibition, organized crime benefits from the government keeping recreational drugs from being distributed through a legal and regulated market. Within that market, the people who win market share win it through violence and intimidation. So even if the police in a particular community are awful, or most drugs should be legalized, what argument does that constitute for refusing to identify a murderer? Considering the power that drug gangs have in the community, identifying a murderer does not pose a risk from solely the person who is identified. It poses a risk from those affiliated with that person as well within the criminal enterprise that so many of them are reliant upon for their own economic survival. Since, as you note, much of the homicides are tied to the drug gangs, this is pretty obvious. You're not just testifying against a murderer, you're potentially weakening an entire organization within the drug trade, one which has an enormous amount of weaponry and willing foot soldiers. What I'm pointing out is that the drug war, and the environment it creates, makes it nearly impossible to get people to comply with police in a number of situations. The choice here is not between cooperating with police, and a perfect world with no police brutality or where poor communities are given all of the resources they need to solve their own problems. The problem in many of these communities isn't so much a lack of resources than it is a lack of opportunity. As Barbosa pointed out, he's now a felon for doing something when he was 18 than just about every single person I knew when I was 18 was doing (but none of them have felonies because I was a white college freshman). Because of that disparity in how drug laws are enforced, and the bleak job prospects a person with a felony on their record has, many people in Barbosa's shoes find that their only avenue to support themselves is to join the drug gangs in their community. That is obviously wishful thinking, and a case of the best being the enemy of the good. Between the live options of taking some step to reduce the murder rate however problematic, and doing nothing, I don't see how this is a debate. This would be true if coming forward would actually lower the murder rate. But it won't. The reason the murder rate is so high there has nothing to do with the fact that people don't come forward. It has to do with the fact that well-funded criminal organizations operate in these areas, and they compete with each other through violent means. Snitches are dead meat in this environment. The police will never be able to protect them. And all of this theorizing about the injustices of American society, though accurate, in this context only serves to obscure that basic reality. Well good luck trying to explain that to some young kid in the inner city who saw what happened to the last poor sucker who talked to the cops. The basic reality is that we've created an environment where there's absolutely no trust between the community and the police. And the drug war is the root of that distrust. And why does Cory Booker want to crack down on the drug trade? Is it because he is a racist? No, it's because he's an idiot. He still hasn't figured out that the drug trade only exists because drugs are illegal. If he were smart, he'd be doing what Fiorello LaGuardia was doing in the 1920s, demanding that prohibition (which he called a war on ethnic Americans) be ended immediately. Last week, I was at a community meeting here in Seattle's black community (Rainier Valley), where 500 people gathered to hear speakers discuss the disparity in drug arrests and demand that we end the war on drugs. It's time Cory Booker got on board with this. Or could it be because his constituents desperately want a safer city, and know of the deep connection between violent crime and the drug trade? And the only way to shut down the drug trade is to legalize the drugs so that the supply is not controlled by criminals. We did the same thing with alcohol in 1932 and we need to do the same thing today with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and meth. Marijuana should be treated like alcohol. With cocaine, heroin, and meth, the supply should be controlled by pharmacists, who should be allowed to provide these drugs to addicts in the form of drug treatment. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a thousand times better than what's happening in Newark (and Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and Chicago, and Tijuana, and Kabul, and...). What we need people like Cory Booker doing is to start standing up and demanding that the war on drugs end. Pointing out the disparity between the enforcement of drug laws in white and black communities seems entirely beside the point. What? That's precisely the point. Take the case of JamesOn Curry, the Oklahoma State basketball player. As a senior in high school in North Carolina, he befriended a man. The man asked him if he could help get him a bag of weed. Curry, knowing who to ask, got him one. The guy was an undercover cop. Curry lost his scholarship to UNC and faced six separate drug charges. Curry, being the best high school basketball player in the state, got a second chance. What do you think happened to the 48 other kids busted in that sting? They get felonies on their record and can no longer get financial aid for school, they can't vote, and have a very difficult time getting employment for the rest of their life. You could arrest just about any white college student in this country that way. But drug stings like that rarely get used outside of poor minority communities. The disparity between how drug law enforcement is done in black communities and white communities is the heart of the problem that ends with Stop Snitching and large-scale criminal organizations rooted in our inner-cities. And I can tell you this much: if rich white kids doing heroin at my high school had had the same consequences for my community as the drug trade has had for Newark, I bet I would have a very different perspective on drug legalization. I can guarantee you that if the drug law enforcement methods that are used in black communities were used today to stop kids dealing drugs at white high schools across the country, drugs would be legal tomorrow. People are right to point out the historical explanation for why the norm against cooperating with police originated, just as you can look to the history of Sicily to see why the code of Omerta familiar from the Mafia originated. But to pretend that this norm is not completely dysfunctional for poor communities today is both foolish and tragic. I'm not saying that it's not dysfunctional. What I'm saying is that it's caused almost entirely by this nation's war on drugs. And this is something that over the past few years, many people in the black community are quickly becoming aware of. Without understanding how this futile, senseless war is destroying these communities, it's all to easy for people to just look at black communities and believe that criminality is part of their culture.
thehim: I agree with a lot of what you have to say, I think in part we were just speaking to different aspects of the issue. You are saying that you can understand why people refuse to cooperate with police, given the danger that cooperation poses to them. I can certainly understand this point: my post was really meant more to reject this as an ethical norm than a survival strategy. Obviously if you fear for your life if you threaten the power of the drug gangs then I am not going to moralistically lecture you for not being a good citizen. But it does seem to me that some people here and surrounding this debate as a whole present refusing to cooperate with police as if it were some sort of ethical imperative rather than a survival strategy, and that is really where I was lodging my disagreement. Telling the police about who committed a murder does not make you a bad person or constitute a betrayal of your community, even if choosing not to can be completely understandable. It's funny that you should mention JamesOn Curry as an example. I grew up in Oklahoma and am actually a huge OSU fan, though I'll confess that I had never heard the full story behind his arrest before. But I absolutely agree with you that there is no question that marijuana should be legalized and that there is much racism in the enforcement of drug laws, and I certainly understand where you are coming from in your arguments for broader legalization of drugs. I am very sympathetic to those arguments, and used to be totally convinced by them. While remaining sympathetic what has caused me to come to doubt the arguments is an article that I read by Elliott Currie, who wrote a wonderful book called Crime and Punishment in America. In that book he lays out what to me seems like an incontestable indictment of the current policies embodied in the criminal justice system, and shows how a humane and liberal alternative is both possible and desirable. Anyway, knowing that he is not some conservative hack I took it very seriously when I found out that he is actually opposed to the legalization of hard drugs. Here's the link to the article where he makes the case. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_limits_of_legalization I won't say that I am completely persuaded by everything that he says, but I am more wary now that drug legalization is the panacea that I once thought it was. Thanks for the engaging response.
My bullshit meter just exploded from reading these comments. One commenter admitted he was a felon and then complained of being "persecuted" by the police. At some point liberals will simply have to admit that blacks commit an alarmingly disporportionate number of crimes in every category, including drug offenses. By making excuses for a group of people's behaviour by blaming poverty or the police is to disrespect them by treating them like children with no accountability (in fact I consider this a form of racism). The abundance of black crime is compounded by, and to some degree caused by, a culture where the refusal to snitch on the people that destroy your neightborhoods and endanger your children is somehow honorable. Of course this is really a justification for cowardice (cowardice itself is understandable, but not if its hidden behind a billshit code of honor). Loyalty does not extend to murderers and poison-dealers. It's time to start snitchin.
Are you kidding me, Matt? Cory Booker a "wanker"? This is the guy who lived in a Newark slum for years and ran twice for mayor of one of the most challenging cities to govern in the U.S.? Who took on the Sharpe James machine to do it? Where exactly does some blogger get off calling Cory Booker a "wanker"?
Some of these comments remind me of Bob Herbert's silly column in the NY Times Saturday. As long as blacks commit crimes at 7 times the rate whites do, young blacks will attract some attention from police. As for no-snitching being blow back for broken-windows policing strategies: it's a stupid form of blow back, considering that blacks and Latinos are more often the victims of black and Latino criminals than whites are. I can't see much political support for a return to 70's-era laissez-fair policing in the big cities. Even lefties don't miss being terrorized by muggers in places like Manhattan. If that means a few innocent black and Latino teenagers are scrutinized more than students at the Bronx school of science, then so be it.
"But I'm not against snitching on murderers, because killing people is a really bad thing and it needs to be stopped." Sure. I'll enthusiastically sign your anti-murder petition. But I thought a blanket pro-snitching position warranted attack.
"Even lefties don't miss being terrorized by muggers in places like Manhattan." I think the Giuliani reign of terror deprecated Manhattan. The chronic low level of crime kept to a reasonable level the population of undesirable swells who run roughshod over the city toady.
I don't know that much Cory Booker, but in general my perceptions of him went through a couple stages:
A couple people say things along the lines of Blacks commit an alarmingly disproportionate number of crimes in every category, including drug offenses. But actually, whites use illegal drugs at higher rates than African-Americans. But the police target crack dealers on the streets, not cocaine dealers in college dorms.
If you want to know more about Cory Booker, watch the documentary about the 2002 Newark election, Street Fight. It was a little cursory, and maybe he's changed in the past 5 years, but he seemed like a politician worth supporting. (Ok Booker, you can direct the check to the address on my site ... Oh shit, pseudonymity ...)
NGF, There are a number of reasons why this is a good idea, even beyond the whole issue of black market violence and the disparities in law enforcement. Heroin is probably the best example. Several countries have already set up clinics where addicts can use heroin legally and safely. In Zurich, after ten years of allowing this, the amount of new heroin users dropped by over 80%. And because addicts didn't have to steal to buy from the drug dealers, crime went way down as well. I personally believe that people's continued recreational use of drugs is going to exist no matter what we do, so the smart thing to do is to make it as unattractive as possible for new people to start. Unfortunately, outlawing these substances has the opposite effect. Making drugs like heroin and cocaine illegal increases their allure to young people. If you treat heroin and meth addicts as sick people rather than as rebellious outlaws, you make the use of those drugs far less attractive. It's important to remember that at the beginning of the 20th century, people could buy both heroin and cocaine legally, and those drugs did no more damage to society at the time than what alcohol was doing. We've managed to make ourselves more afraid of what these drugs will do than what is real. Even meth has had a number of uses over the years. The reason that meth has been so dangerous recently is because within the black market, it's become extremely pure. It doesn't have to be so dangerous. It's illegality is what causes it.
At some point liberals will simply have to admit that blacks commit an alarmingly disporportionate number of crimes in every category, including drug offenses. Wow, what an incredibly misinformed comment. Just sad, really.
The "broken window" theory of law enforcement is part of the right wing's assault on logic and reason. Broken windows do not cause crime; criminals break windows. The police make no effort to catch vandals; they issue citations to people whose property has been vandalized.
Comments closed June 10, 2007. |
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Heads in the Sand
"People should help him out and cooperate with the police."
Alert!
Matt wantonly steals IP. Definitely music, and probably movies. Maybe not software.
I've notified the RIAA, along with giving them the info that you'll have enough cash to pay their lawyers fees after they win the case. (They like cases like that.)
Expect the initial affidavit shortly.
After snitching, my conscience feels as clean and fresh as a newborn babe. Next up, I figure I'll start asking for green cards from all the foreign restaurant workers in town.
Snitching is fun and addictive. I appreciate the advice. Previously, I'd taken a more WB attitude to the matter.
Posted by Petey | May 27, 2007 3:09 PM