Yesterday, January 11, between three and five thousand residents converged on New Orleans’ City Hall, fed up over what they perceived as Mayor Nagin’s, NOPD Superintendent Riley’s and Orleans Parish DA Jordan’s laissez-faire leadership regarding the burgeoning, almost unstoppable murder rate that claimed the lives of nine people, including Hot 8 Brass Band snare drummer Dinerral Shavers and filmmaker and mother Helen Hill who were murdered in front of their own families.
However, NOPD police shouldn’t see this rally as support for some of their most egregious actions both before and after Katrina. And while many blacks were among the protesters, the ones that truly needed to hear the revulsion and anger of their neighbors weren’t there.
No, not the murderers. Of course, they don’t give a shit.
It’s the witnesses who refuse testify–or snitch–against them.
The New Orleans Police Department has always had a reputation for being as corrupt and as brutal as the criminals they’re supposed to curb. Many officers have been involved with the Mob, with the drug trade, and with their own petty vendettas. Add to it their seeming penchant for abusing, killing and sometimes illegally jailing black and other minority males, and there are reasons for continuing distrust and hatred.
This reputation for abuses and murders, of course, is why minority communities continue to distrust the police. And it’s no different in New Orleans, where, as Adam Nossiter wrote this week in the New York Times:
The police, feared and hated by the city’s poor, get no cooperation from them in solving crimes. “Stop that snitchin!” is the inscription on the T-shirt of a man waiting for a bus on Canal Street. In killing after killing, police officials have begged for witnesses to step up, to no avail.
The result is an unwitting carrying out of the classic Maoist strategy of guerilla insurgency: criminals swim like fish in the surrounding sea, protected by a population that finds no reason to give them up, and is often afraid to.
The man at the bus stop wearing the Stop Snitching teeshirt is a sympathizer in a much larger movement that stretches from New York, to Baltimore, to Boston, to Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia, to Los Angeles, to Atlanta and to New Orleans. I used to see those teeshirts being hawked daily on 125th Street in Harlem, and being worn proudly–even defiantly–by young men and women alike. Websites have even sprung up to ‘rat out’ suspected informers, or snitches.
And for $89.99, you can get a lifetime membership at WhosaRat.com, a Web site devoted to exposing the identities of police informants and witnesses.
Many of these Stop Snitching sympathizers are in the hip-hop nation.
The no-snitching message also has been delivered via rap songs and by the actions of celebrities; 50 witnesses to the murder of a bodyguard for rapper Busta Rhymes have refused to cooperate with police, including Rhymes himself. The murders of rappers Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and Run DMC’s Jam Master Jay have all gone unsolved for similar reasons.
Not only that, says Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, who found a Latino youngster shot dead in an alley behind her home:
[..A] lot of young people have been seduced by the thug lifestyle. They are playing by a different set of rules.
When something terrible happens, everyone knows, but no one knows who did it.
Because of the silence, it’s become an excuse to entertain conspiracy fantasies about the deaths of these hip-hop innovators. It’s also an excuse for witnesses or potential informants to episodes of violent crime to clam up, for fear of being murdered or maimed, and there have been multiple examples of retaliation against witnesses, their families and friends, even those perpetrated by members of the NOPD themselves in the bad old days before the Justice Department stepped in. I would not doubt that Dinerral Shavers’ killer is confident that he won’t be prosecuted for lack of witnesses. The police still have no suspects in Helen Hill’s
murder, although pressure certainly will be brought to bear for this young white woman’s death. More importantly, there are still have no suspects in the other murders that were perpetrated on ordinary citizens who turned out to be not as well-known or loved as Shavers and Hill, but just as wonderful and just as valuable to a community that prides itself on diversity like New Orleans.
Not just because there were no witnesses.
But because there were, and that they refused to talk.
And they need to talk, this time, for the very survival of New Orleans.
[..Y]oung people who support the “No Snitch” campaign are contributing to their own destruction.
Obviously, there are crooked cops who are abusing hardworking citizens in these neighborhoods.
Still, the majority of police officers are committed to protecting citizens.
But cops can’t protect citizens who don’t want to help themselves. That’s why the “Stop Snitching” campaign has to stop.
The message is doing more than selling rap DVDs and T-shirts.
It is selling out big chunks of the black community.
A few more notes…
This turned out to be Dinerral Shavers’ last Mardi Gras with the Hot 8 Brass Band, even as it was the first Mardi Gras after Katrina. You can barely see him, wearing a white football shirt with 55 printed on it, dwarfed next to the bass drummer, Benny “Swamp Thing” Pete, behind the horns. It is his snare drumming that you hear introducing the band’s signature pieces.
Listen to him play at an hour long session at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor early last year. There are only four of the band present, but it seems as if they are all there. Dinerral makes his drums speak for them all.
If you would like to give something in support of Dinerral’s family, or to help defray his funeral expenses, go here, and remember to specify that your contribution go to Dinerral Shavers’ Fund.
Rest in peace, Dinerral.
And, guess what? Your 80-piece marching band will step proudly out on schedule at Mardi Gras.
Fly away.
