In the United States, Stop Snitchin' or Snitches Get Stitches is a call for informants not to cooperate with law enforcement.
T-shirts bearing the phrase "Stop Snitching" first appeared on the streets of Philadelphia in 2002. [1]
The Stop Snitchin' campaign first gained national attention in late 2004 in Baltimore, Maryland, when a DVD released by Rodney Thomas [2] titled "Stop Snitching!" began to circulate. However, the slogan "Stop Snitchin'" and many other variations have existed in the United States long before the campaign became popular.
In some footage, a number of men claiming to be drug dealers address the camera, and threaten violence against anyone who reports what they know about their crimes to the authorities. This threat is directed especially towards those who inform on others to get a lighter sentence for their own crimes. NBA star Carmelo Anthony briefly appeared in the video. [3] In subsequent interviews, Anthony claimed that his appearance in the video was a joke, the product of his neighborhood friends making a home movie. [4] Anthony claims that the film's message should not be taken seriously. [5]
As the DVD spread across the country, corresponding shirts became popular in urban youth fashion. The shirts typically show a stop sign emblazoned with the words "Stop Snitchin'". Some shirts bear bullet holes, implying that snitches should (or will) be shot and sent to the hospital, thus referencing its associated catchphrase "snitches get stitches". The shirts have been more widely circulated than the original DVD.[ citation needed ]
The Diplomats, a Harlem-based rap group, made their own version of the Stop Snitchin' shirts, with their logo on the end of the short sleeves. Another such shirt says "I'll never Tell". A new breed of shirts appeared for sale in flea markets and bazaars in south Dallas, Texas, in mid-2010. The new shirts extolled the benefits of "keeping yo' mouth shut" in regards to a trial involving one "Fifi/Lisa" and one "Baldy/Red". Further details of the trial, including a list of various charges set forth on the couple, are listed on the back of the shirt.
The video's creator, Rodney Thomas, a.k.a. "Skinny Suge", pleaded guilty to first-degree assault on January 17, 2006, in Baltimore and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, with all but three years suspended. [2]
National examples of violence due to "snitching" include Angela Dawson of Baltimore, who was killed along with her five children and husband on October 16, 2002, when their house was firebombed after she alerted police to illegal activities in her neighborhood. [6] Another example is Michael Brewer of Deerfield Beach, Florida, a 15-year-old who, in October 2009, was doused in rubbing alcohol and set on fire after assailants yelled, "He's a snitch, he's a snitch." [7]
In response to the video, the Baltimore Police Department created their own campaign, "Keep Talkin'", which used free DVDs and T-shirts in a method similar to that of the Stop Snitchin' campaign. [8] Its goal was to assure potential state witnesses of their safety from retaliation and stress the importance of imprisoning lawbreakers.
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Rayco Saunders was to be a witness against three men charged with plotting to kill him. But he showed up in court wearing a shirt that said "Stop Snitching" and refused to cooperate with prosecutors. Charges against the men were dismissed. [9]
Left-wing activist rapper Immortal Technique gave a well-known interview to XXL in which he contended that Blacks and Latinos should not snitch until police officers begin informing on each other for brutality and agents of the American government take responsibility for their actions. [10]
Rapper Cam'ron was featured on the April 22, 2007, edition of the television news program 60 Minutes , and was interviewed by Anderson Cooper about the "Stop Snitching" campaign. When asked if he would tell the police if a serial killer was living next to him, he replied: "I would probably move," but he would not inform the police. Cam'ron was a victim of a shooting that revealed no leads or clues because he refused to give police information about the suspect, claiming it would hurt his business and violate his "code of ethics". According to NYPD records, Cam'ron has cooperated with police in the past. [11]
The entire Stop Snitchin' campaign has been parodied by an episode of the television series The Boondocks .
Some rappers, such as Ice Cube ("Stop Snitchin'" on Laugh Now, Cry Later ), have made songs promoting the movement. Lil Wayne has a song called "Snitch" from his album, Tha Carter , and The Game has titled one of his mixtape albums/DVD, Stop Snitchin, Stop Lyin . Memphis' Project Pat also has a song called "Tell Tell Tell (Stop Snitchin)" from his album Crook by da Book: The Fed Story . Rapper Obie Trice has a song entitled "snitch" in which he says, "snitch and you will get hit".
Boston mayor Thomas Menino announced that he would begin confiscating Stop Snitchin' shirts from local stores. Though Menino rapidly backed away from mandatory confiscation to endorse voluntary removal of the shirts by store owners, his proposals sparked considerable controversy locally and nationally. Though many saw the initiative as ineffective, counterproductive, or misleading, some community members in so called "high-crime" areas such as Dorchester defended the move as important to conquering fear on the streets and assisting in criminal prosecutions. [12]
The shirts gained attention in Boston in 2004 when the mother of an alleged gang member (and a number of other spectators) wore the shirt during her son's trial for the shooting death of 10-year-old Trina Persad. [13] Suffolk Superior Court Judge Margaret R. Hinkle successfully banned the shirts from the courtroom as a witness intimidation tactic.
An Antonio Ansaldi store in Dorchester removed Stop Snitchin' shirts from shelves after Marco Antonio Ennis, who owns the store and manufactures the shirts, met with the mayor, community members, and relatives of recent homicide victims. [14] Other stores, including Bargain T and T in Roxbury agreed to cease selling the shirts.[ citation needed ]
The Stop Snitchin' debate was revived when a Boston judge banned the shirts from all state courthouses, also disallowing camera phones in the interest of witness protection. [15]
The Snitching Project, led by Rick Frei of the Community College of Philadelphia, is an ongoing student-driven interdisciplinary research initiative aimed at developing a better understanding of the "snitching" phenomenon and facilitating community discussion through education. The project is sponsored by the Fox Rothschild Center for Law and Society. [16]
Begun as an educational project in 2007, the Snitching Project relies on inner city students, who are on the front lines of the Stop Snitching culture, to collect data regarding attitudes towards snitching, as well as dispositional and situational variables that might influence a person's propensity to cooperate with police. [17]
In January 2010, in response to scathing investigatory series on the Philadelphia court system in The Philadelphia Inquirer , [18] Frei testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs about the relationship between the Stop Snitching phenomenon and other forms of witness intimidation. [19] Frei and his students have appeared as panelists on a number of local and national television and radio programs (TruTV), as well as academic conferences. In addition, the students organize and co-sponsor their own conference on the topic, entitled "The Shh! Conference: The Stop Snitching Phenomenon, Witness Intimidation, and Silence About Crime". In its third year, the conference has been attended by nearly 2,000 students and community members in Philadelphia [20] Speakers included Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, nationally syndicated and controversial hip-hop DJ STAR, Pulitzer Prize-nominated mob author George Anastasia, head of security for the Comcast Center Jim Birch, and Philadelphia District Attorney Integrity Officer Curtis Douglas. Recent topics have included the use of cell phones to record crimes, underage sexting, and the use of social media to intimidate witnesses. The current project focuses on the concept of street vs. decent family orientation (as conceptualized in Elijah Anderson's seminal ethnography Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City) as a predictor of attitudes towards snitching and perceptions of disrespect.
The project also sponsors a student-created and -edited Facebook page, which includes copies of past surveys, results from the data collection effort, an extensive history of snitching, and links to relevant websites and articles on the topic of snitching. [21]
In 2007, the National Center for Victims of Crime released the study "'Snitches Get Stitches': Youth, Gangs, and Witness Intimidation in Massachusetts" which sought to "[develop] a comprehensive response to the more recent phenomenon of witness intimidation of primarily teen and young adult witnesses by street gangs." With the help of the Boys & Girls Clubs, 641 Massachusetts youth ages 12 to 20 were recruited to participate in interviews about "the prevalence and impact of gangs in the youths’ communities and schools, their experiences with gang-related crime and witness intimidation, their relationships with law enforcement, and their ideas for making it safer for youth to report crime to law enforcement and school officials." [22]
A gang is a group or society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectively, in illegal, and possibly violent, behavior, with such behavior often constituting a form of organized crime.
Cam'ron Giles, better known by his stage name Cam'ron, is an American rapper. Beginning his career in the early-1990s as Killa Cam, Giles signed with Lance "Un" Rivera's Untertainment, an imprint of Epic Records to release his first two studio albums Confessions of Fire (1998) and S.D.E. (2000); the former received gold certification by the RIAA. After leaving Epic, Giles signed with Roc-A-Fella Records in 2001 to release his third studio album, Come Home with Me, the following year. It received platinum certification by the RIAA and spawned the singles "Oh Boy" and "Hey Ma", which peaked at numbers four and three on the Billboard Hot 100, respectively. His fourth studio album, Purple Haze (2004) was met with similar success and likewise received gold certification by the RIAA.
The Black Mafia, also known as the Philadelphia Black Mafia (PBM), Black Muslim Mafia and Muslim Mob, was a Philadelphia-based African-American organized crime syndicate. The organization began in the 1960s as a relatively small criminal collective in South Philadelphia, known for holding up neighborhood crap games and dealing in the illegal drug business, but at its height of operation in the early 1970s until about the early 1980s, it managed to consolidate power and control a large portion of criminal activity in various African-American neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, including South Jersey, Chester, and Wilmington. In addition to drug trafficking, burglary, and armed robbery, the Black Mafia was also engaged in traditional organized crime activities such as political corruption, extortion, racketeering, prostitution, loansharking, number running, and other illegal gambling rackets.
Witness tampering is the act of attempting to improperly influence, alter or prevent the testimony of witnesses within criminal or civil proceedings.
An informant is a person who provides privileged information, or information intended to be intimate, concealed, or secret, about a person or organization to an agency, often a government or law enforcement agency. The term is usually used within the law-enforcement world, where informants are officially known as confidential human sources (CHS), or criminal informants (CI). It can also refer pejoratively to someone who supplies information without the consent of the involved parties. The term is commonly used in politics, industry, entertainment, and academia.
The Irish Mob is a usually crime family–based ethnic collective of organized crime syndicates composed of primarily ethnic Irish members which operate primarily in Ireland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, and have been in existence since the early 19th century. Originating in Irish-American street gangs – famously first depicted in Herbert Asbury's 1927 book, The Gangs of New York – the Irish Mob has appeared in most major U.S. and Canadian cities, especially in the Northeast and the urban industrial Midwest, including Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Chicago.
Avon Randolph Barksdale is a fictional character in the American television series The Wire, played by Wood Harris. Barksdale is one of the most powerful drug dealers in Baltimore, Maryland, and runs the Barksdale Organization. Stringer Bell, his second in command, insulates Barksdale from law enforcement and potential enemies. Working for Barksdale and Bell is a large organization of drug dealers and enforcers.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African American organized crime emerged following the first and second large-scale migration of African Americans from the Southern United States to major cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and later the West Coast. In many of these newly established communities and neighborhoods, criminal activities such as illegal gambling, speakeasies and were seen in the post-World War I and Prohibition eras. Although the majority of these businesses in African American neighborhoods were operated by African Americans, it is often unclear the extent to which these operations were run independently of the larger criminal organizations of the time.
Reginald "Bubbles" Cousins is a fictional character on the HBO drama The Wire, played by actor Andre Royo. Bubbles is a recovering heroin addict. His real name is not revealed until a fourth-season episode when he is called "Mr. Cousins" and in the fifth-season premiere when he is called "Reginald". Bubbles has a son named KeyShawn, who lives with his mother. He is nicknamed "Bubbles" because when he is in a heroin-induced stupor, he tends to make bubbles with his spit.
Proibidão, which literally translates to "strongly prohibited", is a subgenre of funk carioca music originating from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro where it began in the early 1990s as a parallel phenomenon to the growth of drug gangs in the many slums of the city. The drug gangs sponsored DJs and baile funks in the favelas they controlled to spread respect and love for their gang as well as hate to the other gangs. The music that resulted is proibidão.
William A. King and Antonio L. Murray are two former Baltimore Police Department officers sentenced to a total of 454 years in prison after an FBI investigation in 2005. The conviction of King and Murray resulted from the Baltimore-based Stop Snitchin' campaign in which the two officers were identified on videotape for being involved in drug dealing. Ironically, the case received help from drug dealers, who testified that the two officers were involved in the use of robbery, extortion, and excessive force against various dealers as a means of reselling the drugs for profit on the street. Former police commissioner Leonard Hamm said that "justice was served", and that "People like William King have no place in the Baltimore City Police Department, and never will".
California Proposition 6, also known as the Safe Neighborhoods Act and The Runner Initiative, is a statutory initiative that appeared on the November 2008 ballot in California. This proposition was rejected by voters on November 4 of that year.
The history of gangs in Australia goes back to the colonial era. Criminal gangs flourished in The Rocks district of Sydney in its early history in the 19th century. The Rocks Push was a notorious larrikin gang which dominated the area from the 1800s to the end of the 1900s. The gang was engaged in running warfare with other larrikin gangs of the time such as the Straw Hat Push, the Glebe Push, the Argyle Cut Push, the Forty Thieves from Surry Hills, and the Gibb Street Mob.
Lawrence Robert Lawton is an American ex-convict, author, paralegal, motivational speaker, and YouTuber. Lawton gained notoriety for committing a string of jewelry store robberies along the Atlantic Seaboard prior to his arrest in 1996. He spent 12 years in prison, and once released, began a career as a motivational speaker, life coach, and author.
David M. Kennedy is an American criminologist, professor, action researcher, and author specializing in crime prevention among inner city gangs, especially in the prevention of violent acts among street gangs. Kennedy developed the Operation Ceasefire group violence intervention in Boston in the 1990s and the High Point Model drug market intervention in High Point, North Carolina, in 2003, which have proven to reduce violence and eliminate overt drug markets in jurisdictions around the United States. He founded the National Network for Safe Communities in 2009 to support cities using these and related strategies.
Indo-Canadian organized crime is made up predominantly of young adults and teenagers of Indian ethnic, cultural and linguistic background. Collectively, these groups are among the top 5 major homegrown organized crime hierarchy across the nation in Canada coming in 3rd place, after the Asian Triads and White biker gangs. The 2004 RCMP British Columbia Annual Police Report ranked them third in terms of organization and sophistication in British Columbia, ranked behind outlaw motorcycle clubs and aforementioned Chinese criminal organizations such as the Triads drug clans.
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The Witness Security Programme in Ireland is administered by the Attorney General of Ireland, and is operated by the Garda Síochána, the national police force. Witness protection in Ireland is used in cases of serious, organised crime and terrorism. The programme is under the operational control of the elite Garda Special Detective Unit (SDU), attached to the Garda Crime & Security Branch (CSB).
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Anthony Ciulla, later Tony Capra was an American criminal, convicted of bribing jockeys and fixing horse races. He was connected to the Boston-based Winter Hill Gang and later testified against several members of the organization.
