The power of the tongue is life and death.
- Clipse, “There Was a Murder”
Stop Snitching. Call it a movement, call it a criminal conspiracy, call it a gimmick to sell crap cd/dvds & tshirts. For those who’ve slept, and for my own enjoyment of the art form, I offer a brief compendium of definitions:
“stop snitching” (stop snich-ing) | slang
1. “never let shit about G’s leave your mouth.” [Wayne, 2007]
2. “the hustler’s dedicate”: “rather hung yourself than turn state’s evidence.” See also “Mum’s the word” [Clipse, 2009]
3. “don’t tattletale, the number one ruley” [Mac Dre, ] [RIP]
4. “when you get shot up, please don’t rat, don’t tell on that man, go shoot his ass back.” [Uncle Murda, 2009]
5. “stop talking to the cops.” [the Game, 2006]
If Stop Snitching is a code, it is also an explicit threat of violence against police informants. My favorite example being Uncle Murda: If you snitch, he’ll kill your mother, your grandmother, and your great-grandmother. (He’ll kill them!) He will rap with his boys next to your corpse. (You’re dead!). Lil Wayne (less convincingly) offers his Automatic to the cause; Clipse – in a rather weary tone – seem resigned to the objective fact that There Will Be a Murder in the event of a snitching. Other rappers (who will go unnamed here because I don’t think they’re terribly good) get a lot more personal with their snitch-murder fantasies. And in a particularly lame development, the storied tradition of rap beef has of late been reduced to calling other rappers Snitches, and telling them to Stop. (see generally, Cam’ron - prepare for yawning).
Predictably, there’s been a lot of critics of this phenomenon: folks who have been victims of crime or are vulnerable to it, law & order types, right wing pundits, and – surprise – law enforcement.
Defenders of Stop Snitching have offered forth a number of defenses in return: the doctrine has a softer, philosophical side (“If a man talk about another man while that man ain’t present, a man don’t listen/ They throwin brick but they hands is missin” – L.W.); the code only applies to those already involved in the criminal enterprise. (“Don’t do that crime / if you can’t do that that time / I’m serious: be true to yourself dawg / you ain’t got to be a thug dawg/ do something else dawg.” – Uncle M); The rule only restates common codes of loyalty between friends.. (“Yo own people could be them people / No glasses can help you see them people / They around too many evil people” – L.W.)
There’s also a political defense of the Stop Snitching movement. One particularly fun iteration of this by Immortal Technique was recently published in XXL :
If the police want people to start speaking to authorities, maybe they should start speaking to authorities. They want people to take the stand? Maybe they should walk around the blue wall of silence and take the stand themselves … I’ve never seen an officer take the stand against another one and be like, Yeah, your honor, I saw my partner bash that kid’s head in ’cause he was Black and had an attitude. I’ve never heard one of them say, No, we had no reason to stop them. We just do that all the time on the highway in Jersey and hope we get lucky.
And what about the government? You [ever] heard the Feds snitch on each other with it resulting in shit? What about the CIA? They kill snitches. Who ever heard Col. Oliver North—who was funneling drug money and weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua—snitch on Reagan? Fuck outta here, nigga. You never heard of anything like that. You want us to snitch? You snitch, muthafucka. You want crimes solved? So do we. You want truth? Guess what? We do too. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr. Tupac. Biggie. Agent 800. Gulf War Syndrome. Cancer clusters in the ’hood. JFK. 9/11. Anthrax. The circumstances behind the War in Iraq. The funding of the Taliban by America up to five months before Sept. 11, 2001. Start there. We should start a “Start Snitching” campaign for the government to come to terms with what they’ve done to us before we point the finger at another brother.
Much as I’d like to be totes sympathetic to this inflammatory morsel, I can’t really get behind the main premise that one Justice necessarily precedes another, which is to say, I’m not sure that the hypocrisy of Stop Snitching’s gov’t detractors is really enough to justify a standstill of law enforcement in the country writ large. But I sense that Tech is also making a structural argument that snitching contributes to the existing inequity of the criminal justice system … and so any government rat is also circumstantially a traitor of his people.
N- can’t you see?
Sometimes your words incarcerate me…
Can’t say shit, that’s basic – they wanna send a N- back to the slave ship
- Ice Cube, “Stop Snitching
They want Latinos and Blacks to snitch on 
each other? They want the ’hood to snitch on itself? I spent an extra six months locked up and a month in the hole over saying nothing to the police, even after my co-defendant sang like a fuckin’ canary…I take that snitching shit personally. They didn’t break me or make me talk. I wasn’t for sale. And I don’t think that our loyalty as a people should be either.
- Immortal Technique
On the real, it’s not like rappers are the only people noticing the perverse criminal justice implications of snitching. The Innocence Project identifies Snitches as one of their six primary causes of false convictions. According to their data, 15% of folks exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence were convicted using snitch testimony. A study by Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions found that snitches are responsible for 46% of wrongful capital convictions from false testimony. According to my data, 100% of the 3 individuals (not exactly statistically significant, I concede) I know of that were wrongly convicted and exonerated were convicted on the basis of snitch testimony (and one involved some super-shady police hypnosis…).The Canadian government’s also done some studies, but we’re in Uh-Murk-a here, and we don’t mess with Canada, Drake or no Drake. (JK it’s on the Innocence Project website).
A civilized and free society would not be discussing, much less seriously debating, any proposal to enlist private citizens to act as federal neighborhood snitches.
- Rep. Ron Paul
Where the Stop Snitching campaign fails, though, is the limited reach of its vision. A system where snitching works is, according to its rhetoric, a failure of manhood, a proliferation of fake hustlers, a moral disintegration in the brotherhood of thug. It does not contemplate that a system of snitching is a system that gives prosecutors unbridled power to decide whether an individual gets let off the hook or has the book thrown at him; not to mention the skewing of our sentencing laws such that the book that gets thrown is crazy heavy. Or, to use the ever pithy words of Public Broadcasting, Stop Snitching does not contemplate how the “fundamental shift in the country’s anti-drug laws — including federal mandatory minimum sentencing and conspiracy provisions–has bred a culture of snitching that is in many cases rewarding the guiltiest and punishing the less guilty.”
In other words, Stop Snitching is almost Republican in the individualism of its ethos, which comes at the expense of a robust structural account of things. Which honestly, in unsurprising, given how much of the hustler / don / rap mogul narrative runs parallel to the bootstraps American Dream narrative.
Stat: 97% of convictions occurring within a year of arrest were obtained through a plea. About 9 in 10 of those pleas were to a felony. In other words, everything gets settled out of court, sans jury. So why are the anti-snitching songbirds so concerned with the ability of informants to “turn state’s evidence” when such a tiny tiny margin of criminal convictions actually go to trial? Isn’t the real problem pleading? Is it that rappers and Youtube video producers and Tshirt manufacturers compose the entirety of the 3% of individuals who turn down the plea, actually go to trial on their charges, and are subsequently convicted on the basis of snitch testimony? Or is it, as I prefer to think, simply that the movement got wrapped up in its own macho bluster, and got tagged with a misnomer that’s snowballed?
If you out there thuggin in the streets, doin’ what you do,
And you get jammed up
Don’t give up your mans in the muthafucka
Try to cut a CO or something when you in jail – Start a revolution
Don’t be no muthafuckin snitch; Don’t do the police job!
- Uncle Murda, “Please Don’t Snitch”
Why not a Stop Pleading movement instead? Without it we’re left in the odd situation where it’s unacceptable to take a light plea in exchange for snitching on someone else, but totally kosher to snitch on yourself for the same. Imagine a world without pleading. Cops would actually need probable cause to hold someone. Prosecutors would have to actually prove things beyond a reasonable doubt. The machinery of criminal justice wouldn’t be able to function by repeatedly targeting the same community. Biggie AND his woman would be in prison. Prisons would be crazy overcrowded. The system would be overloaded. Folks in power would have to start talking about revamping the laws to cut down on incarcerating nonviolent offenders. What if everyone Stopped Pleading for a year? Like a 12 day labor strike, but for criminal, rather than economic justice. Shit, if I had the cred and I felt ok about telling the world to man up and do the time, sick grandma in the hospital and kids to feed irregardless, I’d seriously propose it. I think it’s a more workable revolution, at least, than cutting a CO…
Great post. A few things (I know, I’m a hater).
I think in assuming in your audience’s familiarity with the stop snitching movement, you fail to tease out important distinctions in the various related cultural phenomena you address in the post.
Snitching can mean two things. The first, and arguably purest, kind of snitching involves telling on someone else when you are caught in some manner of wrongdoing. The stigma attached to this kind of snitching stems from basic ideas of decency and personal responsibility. This ethos most implicates the rugged individualism that you aptly compare to the mythos of the Republican party. A key characteristic of this ethos is that it is highly contextualized. It establishes an obligation among those equally situated with respect to an outside presence. Criminals shouldn’t inculpate their brethren, especially when confronted with the classic prisoners dilemma. Most rap references to this kind of snitching involve a scenario where the righteous opt to do their time. See e.g., Styles P. “Lick Shots” (Lick shots for the predicate felons/ and gangsta n-s who know that doin their time is better than tellin’). This is the kind of snitch testimony that the Innocence Project has documented as unreliable and problematic for verdict accuracy. These honor-amongst-thieves-stop-snitchin-proponents are the ones who should be most bothered by the fact that 97% of cases are resolved by plea.
Snitching has also come to mean police cooperation writ large. The “stop snitching movement” refers to the widespread public education/intimidation campaign that sought to appropriate the ethical legitimacy and street cred of the prohibition on first kind of snitching in the criminal code of conduct. This movement reached new heights in public consciousness with the release of the “Stop Snitchin” DVD (featuring Denver Nuggets Forward Carmelo Anthony) in Baltimore in 2004. Following the mainstream media controversy surrounding the release of this DVD, rappers and record executives sought to exploit the marketability of the movement. Rap references to this version of snitching probably increased 20 fold after 2004. This is not to say that stop snitching was a mere marketing scheme or that increased references to peril inherent in police cooperation were inaccurate or inauthentic. I only mean that snitch reprisal was pimped out and marketed just like everything in hip-hop.
(Case in point, Cam’ron, a self-appointed ambassador of the “stop snitchin movement” was called upon by Anderson Cooper to explain his hardline stance against police cooperation on CNN. Hilarity ensued http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=3160182n&tag=related;photovideo)
All of the rappers you reference and justifications you address pertain to this second kind of snitching. I agree with you that the justifications you note (even that offered by Immortal Technique) are largely unpersuasive. I would agree with you/him that the hypocrisy of the man adds another layer of indignity to the already pernicious post-colonial, post-enslavement mindsets that predominate in this country, but I find that insufficient to justify the degree to which “stop snitchin’” impairs law enforcement. I’m more persuaded by rationales offered outside of rap music.
First, much as we’d love to blame rap music, the success of the stop snitchin’ movement speaks to real problems in police community relations. Inner city communities and the individuals therein perceive that the police do not have their interests in mind. The public can register this mistrust through their unwillingness to cooperate with law enforcement personnel. This unwillingness directly affects their traditional measures of success and accountability mechanisms (clearance rates, perceptions of safety by the privileged class), which they are hypothetically invested in and responsive to. While this isn’t a perfect strategy, it is not unreasonable to hope that police will internalize this feedback and react productively to try to rehabilitate community perceptions of police. Second, and related to the first point, police need incentive to actually take the interests of these communities’ into account (as opposed to just creating the perception that they do). Hopefully through the mechanisms identified, the people can influence the police to actually do so. Interestingly, rappers you quote would also be interested in overall clearance rate. The hallmark of a successful stop snitchin campaign is the police’s basic inability to narrow suspects. Cf. The Gant case in Season 1 of the Wire. . . .
The anti snitching songbirds are so concerned with snitching despite the low number of trials for a reason that you identified: the stop snitching movement has been all marketing and macho bluster for some time. However, even if they aren’t holding out in the 3% of individuals who go to trial, they still have ample reason to be concerned about snitches of the first and second kind. As the data demonstrate, people who don’t snitch still take pleas. They just get much worse deals. The evidence against a defendant is a large factor influencing his decision to accept a plea; snitching often provides the prosecutor with a way to get a desired plea. Maybe substantially fewer defendants would take pleas if snitching were less prevalent. For that reason, I think it’s hard to say that the problem is really pleading and not snitching. Perhaps, “Stop Pleading” is a companion slogan instead of a replacement…
Topic for another day perhaps: rappers who snitch on themselves. Cf. M.F. Doom, “Rapp Snitch Knishes”
oh my god i love you both. this is some of the most thoughtful and entertaining material on the subject. way better than the book “Snitch,” available in the law library and perfect light reading for long flights to idaho…