ENRICH THE SNITCH

The Flying Snitch in Harry Potter movies...
adding to the negative stereotype of the witness who provides damning evidence against criminals. 

Today's America, in some places, seems to be reverting to The Wild West. Spontaneous mobs pop up and destroy property with impunity. Looting is commonplace. Police have stood back due to being outnumbered or being told by local politicians to stand down. Our US-Marshall-In-Chief, Donald Trump, was voted out of office, despite his rational stance on law and order. 

It seems a majority of American voters are pleased with illegal immigration, chaos and mob violence. They have voted in a majority of politicians who will do nothing to remedy the root causes of the discord. They will just continue to exploit it for power and corrupt money.

Yet I persist in offering my two cents here! My survival has been founded on characterological optimism. While I have little optimism about the direction the nation is now being steered into, I think there are enough human beings with stubborn persistence and sound minds to eventually change that course.

Some years back, I worked with lifetime residents of Boston's tough neighborhoods where gun crime was worse than it is today. One of my coworkers lived with a man who sold illegal handguns out of the trunk of his car. Another had children in prison. They had become inured to community violence and the poisonous influence of drugs and gangs. 

It was an education of sorts. My own working class city on the other side of Boston was infested with crime, drugs and organized crime. However, street gun violence was not common. As I analyzed the differences between my hometown and the neighborhoods of my coworkers, the core difference became clear: In my hometown, people called the police, identify culprits and would testify against criminals in court. 

In the neighborhoods where my coworkers resided, snitching (helping police to apprehend and convict criminals) was taboo ... and apparently still is in neighborhoods like them across the country.

This community standard establishes all citizens in these dysfunctional neighborhoods as enemies of criminal justice and allies of criminals. The same mobs who rationalize rioting and looting as retribution for police misconduct will not take the risk themselves of helping to get criminals off the street. These mobs are not composed of social justice warriors. They are composed of complicit cowards. 

Perhaps this age of materialist corruption holds a solution. Why not make snitching profitable? Since some of our cities are beginning to look like lawless cow towns of The Wild West, why not use the successful  methods of The Wild West to squash criminal gangs? Why not amply reward snitches to unmask organizers who are goading rioters and looters? Why not amply reward snitches to expose non-profits which misuse their status to foment violence and hatred? 

One thing will always coax a closet snitch out of self-protective cowardice: A sizable monetary reward.

Enrich the snitch. This serves three practical purposes. First, it gets a rather hobbled policing system better access to prosecutable evidence and community-based witnesses. Second, it pumps money into the neighborhoods that are perceived as underprivileged. Third, it primes a pump of community-police cooperation which can eventually break traditional enmity between the two.

Snitches used to be honored as forthcoming witnesses, invested citizens, in America. They have helped quell chaos on the frontiers and organized crime in cities. Brave snitches in The South helped deflate the influence of organized racist gangs. Snitches in government and industry, protected whistleblowers under law, bring down the powerful and corrupt.  

Police departments have utilized paid informants who operated as undercover agents against organized crime. Undercover law enforcement officers also put themselves at great risk to uncover evidence of major criminal activity. It seems to me that devoting specialized units in cities with high violence in certain neighborhoods to develop snitching as a profitable activity for citizens would be one way to make community policing more effective without relying on brutal police methods seen as coming from outside the community. 

Legitimizing snitching for profit could rapidly break down the code of silence that keeps criminality embedded in certain neighborhoods and organizations. Of course, the challenge for some police cultures is the threat that legitimizing snitching will pose to their own internal code of silence. Once transparency infiltrates the process of policing outside, it will inevitably infiltrate the culture inside the system as well.