Snitchless

Ace of Spades HQ: "Interesting review of the book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy.

There's a statistic that surfaces early in...Ghettoside that should catch your attention: black men compose about 6% of the country's population, yet they are the victim in nearly 40% of homicides. And who's killing those black men? The answer is most often other black men. Leovy...explores the culture of black violence, specifically in South Central LA, describing a world that seems to exist hermetically sealed off from the rest of the city. With nearly zero mobility and little policing, the people of South Central are left to fend for themselves - further amplifying the devastating drumbeat of gangs and violence.

The reviewer notes that "Poverty deserves less blame" and "The US has long failed to punish blacks who kill blacks". This last bit brought on this one-star review on Amazon:"

I can tell you from firsthand experience..that the blame for the inability to catch and convict violent criminals in predominantly black neighborhoods falls on the residents of those neighborhoods themselves. The culture of "stop snitching" means that people...who are literally shot point blank in the face by someone who they know from their neighborhood and survive, refuse to testify against that very person, and when forced onto the witness stand, lie and say that the person on trial is not the person who shot them. By the way, in the case I am talking about..there were at least 10 other people who witnessed the perpetrator shoot this person in the face, and not a single one voluntarily came forward.

So it looks like there's some sort of chicken-or-egg problem here. Crappy policing vs. the "no snitch" culture. Did the former produce the latter or did the latter produce the former? Or is there a third phenomenon that caused both?

I think the cop and detective shows on TV give the impression that murders are solved by forensic evidence acquired by sharp-eyed detectives combined with clever deductive reasoning, when in reality, most murders are solved by the police acting on information provided to them by informants, AKA "snitches". So when that source of information dries up, murders don't get solved.