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In normal communities, a person that witnesses a murder and cooperates with the police to put the perpetrator in jail is called a hero, but in many inner-city neighborhoods in this country that person is referred to as a snitch. Snitching is strongly discouraged in the inner city, and almost nothing is so damaging to your music career as being thought of as a snitch. People die, and nobody says anything because it is bad for business.
The "no snitch" ethic is prevalent in hip hop culture adn in many urban communities. How does this impact the criminal justice system, and our society?
"Stop snitchin'" is a catchy hip-hop slogan that encourages the attitude that we live in a lawless society, and that's fine. This attitude can be found in everything from rap music videos to T-shirts and other clothing. "Stop snitchin'" once meant "don’t tell on others if you’re caught committing a crime." Now, it means that nobody should ever cooperate with law enforcement on any matter, under any circumstances. As a result, police say, witnesses are not coming forward, and murders of innocent people are going unsolved. This outrageous message appears within hip-hop videos, on web sites, album covers and street murals. Several well-known rappers talk about it on DVDs. It is a simple and direct message heard in African-American communities across the country: don't talk to the police.
The old line hardcore Mafia lived by the code of omerta - the blood oath of silence. This practice has been broken by turncoat after turncoat, and even the infamous John Gotti could not rely upon it, but the call to stop snitching - on other folks in the 'hood - just gets louder, and louder. Reluctance to talk to police has always been a problem in poor, predominantly African-American neighborhoods, but cops and those who study crime say that in recent years something definately has changed: fueled by hip-hop music, promoted by major corporations, what was once a backroom code of silence among criminals, is now being marketed and promoted to the masses like never before.
One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who has come up from the streets. But, not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that in the industry is what's called 'street credibility."
So innocent American people are dying in the streets of the inner city, and nobody is held accountable because informing on the killer is considered uncool. If you are a rapper and people thought that you would cooperate with the police on a crime, it would be bad for your career, bad for business. In many Baltimore neighborhoods, talking to the law has become a mortal sin, a dishonorable act punishable by social banishment, or worse, assassination. Prosecutors in the city can rattle off a litany of brutal retaliations: houses firebombed, witnesses and their relatives shot, contract hits on 10-year-old children. Witness intimidation, they say, badly hampers their ability to fight crime, and it affects nearly every murder case they try.
The reasons for witnesses reluctance appear to be changing and becoming more complex, with the police confronting a new cultural phenomenon: the spread of the gangland code of silence from organized crime to the population at large. Those who cooperate with the police are labeled “snitches” or “rats", terms once applied only to jailhouse informants or criminals who turned state’s evidence, but now used for civilian witnesses as well. This is particularly true where gangsta culture has been romanticized through rap and hip-hop music and other forms of entertainment, and where the motto “Stop snitching,” is emblazoned on caps and T-shirts, and has become a form of creed.
The Story Of Busta Rhymes
This popular hip-hop star refused to cooperate with police who were investigating the killing of his own bodyguard outside a Brooklyn studio where Rhymes was recording a video with other performers. Police say that although Rhymes and 50 other people may have seen the shooting with their own eyes, no one came forward. This behavior conforms with what followed after the unsolved murders of rappers Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. and Run-DMC's Jam Master Jay.
It's the code of the street: To be a credible rapper, you have to know when to shut up. To violate this would be bad for your reputation, and bad for business.
"Under pressure, I lie for ya, die for ya," Lil' Kim once rapped. Now she's in a federal jail in Philadelphia for failing to tell a grand jury what she knew about some friends involved in a shooting.
Rhymes' silence in the death of body guard Israel Ramirez seemed to puzzle New York's seen-it-all police commissioner, Ray Kelly, an ex-Marine, career NYPD cop and U.S. Customs chief. "Your employee is murdered in front of you," he told reporters, so "you'd think he might want to talk to the police."
Not necessarily, says David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "There's such animosity toward the police in some urban communities that even people who aren't afraid, and who hate crime, still feel cooperating is something good people don't do," Kennedy says. "That's the Busta Rhymes story. He has nothing to fear. He just doesn't want to talk. His reputation would take a dive if he did."
The code of silence, he says, "is breaking out in a way we've never seen before."
"If the word 'snitch' comes out of someone's mouth, I go insane," says Lisa Pellegrini, a Pittsburgh prosecutor. "When young men and women see rappers refuse (to cooperate), they think it's cool. How do we tell them, 'we'll support you,' when they see that?"
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