To snitch or not to snitch

Michael Vick's co-defendants certainly didn't follow what is said to be the black community's code of not snitching. It seems they immediately got busy taking the deals they probably felt they couldn't refuse. So much for some parts of the myth, anyway. A segment of Sunday's "60 Minutes," a rerun, was about the anti-snitching propaganda promoted by some rappers, and allegedly embraced wholesale by young blacks. Sometimes parents or older siblings spend a great deal of time telling little kids not to tattle -- "nobody likes a tattletale." So, for some young people, not snitching might be viewed in the same context. The trouble a kid might get into by tattling on siblings is multiplied by the time he or she gets to school bullies and neighborhood thugs. By then the principle may be the same, but the consequences are far more serious.
When people talk about the anti-snitchers, we don't seem to hear much about the consequences of talking to the wrong people. We do, however, hear a lot about doing the right thing. But for whom? Because school bullies often grow up to be neighborhood thugs with a lot more at stake than being suspended from school, those who look the other way are often doing the right thing for themselves. Of course, the opposite seems to have been true for Vick's co-defendants. If Virginia was Hollywood and they were true gangsters, they would have assumed so much responsibility, there wouldn't have been anything left with which to charge Vick.
But as we see, that's not the way this incident will play out. The lesson in this for young people hung up on not snitching is not about ratting people out. It's about trying to hang with too many homies after you've moved on. No matter how this all ends, Vick might have saved himself a lot of grief and millions of endorsement dollars if he'd been collaborating with fellow athletes rather than people who had absolutely nothing to lose -- until law enforcement started searching the property. Law enforcement is another component in snitching we don't hear much about.
Inner city children don't typically grow up with coloring books containing pictures and phrases such as "the policeman is my friend." In fact, in some instances, police may be seen as just as much the enemy as the neighborhood thugs. There is an underlying cause of distrust of law enforcement, said Joe McCrea, a major in the Muscogee County Sheriff's Office and an adjunct criminal justice professor at Columbus State University. McCrea thinks everyone should take "Introduction to Criminal Justice" because one of the things talked about in that class is the relationship between law enforcement and the citizens it serves. "When it comes to the African-American community, there have been cases such as Rodney King and O.J. Simpson and several other similar cases, that created a lot of mistrust between law enforcement and the community," he said. "Although the cases don't necessarily reflect the same problems, what we've seen is the results of the mistrust created -- with juries and verdicts and things like that. There are statistics that show, proportionately there's mistrust between all different aspects of society and law enforcement, but it's greatest in the African-American community. A lot of that has to do, not only with history, but cases in the '80s and '90s that drew media interest on a large scale."