Radley Balko compares "The Blue Wall of Silence" to the "Stop Snitchin'" "movement":
A few years ago, I attended a conference on the use of police informants. In one session, the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, which discourages African Americans from cooperating with police, came up. I was astonished to hear one hip-hop artist and activist say he would not cooperate with the police even if he had witnessed the rape and murder of an old woman in broad daylight. He just didn't trust the police. I told him his position was absurd: Whatever his concerns about the police when it comes to the use of drug informants (concerns I share), they shouldn't prevent him from cooperating with the investigation of an innocent person's murder. His response: "Isn't the Blue Wall of Silence really just the most successful Stop Snitchin' campaign in history?"
There is no "Stop Snitchin'" movement, there is a T-shirt. Entertainers have an incentive to portray basic acts of self-preservation as a "movement" in order to reinforce their street cred. But the fact is that the incentives for not cooperating with police are as easy as recognizing that while the police will go home, you will have to live in the same neighborhood with the people whose friend was punished for your decision to talk to the cops. As Balko notes, cops don't snitch on other cops because they are punished if they do and rewarded if they don't. Snitches don't just get stitches in the hood or on the beat either -- such codes of silence exist among Jews adhering to a strict interpretation of Talmudic law. What does not snitching look like? It looks like former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sputtering some variation of "I don't recall" 64 times in one hearing.
This, incidentally, is one of the problems with focusing on a mushy definition of culture to avoid acknowledging a very obvious and immediate set of incentives, particularly when, as Monica Potts writes, trying to attribute complex matters to mere black cultural pathology.
