Snitches Get Ditches: Crime Reporting in the Inner City

This was a very interesting story I did in 2008 that ended up as the cover story on the trade mag Broadcasting & Cable; I believe it was the first time a controversial topic was tackled from this particular angle, which is always gratifying.

"See No Evil" is about how people in the inner-city abide quite strictly by the "stop snitching" code--you don't rat out the bad guys even if they've done really bad things--and how that affects reporting on crime in these areas.

Reporters spoke of youths walking by, making the sound of a gun cocking, while they worked their beats on a local crime story, or having their vehicles vandalized to send a message to back the f*** off.

I don't get to do a lot of investigative reporting, but this one did take on a tough issue and hopefully shone a bit of light on it. 

Here are a few grafs. 

So goes investigative reporting in Kansas City and several other markets in America, as the Stop Snitching movement gains momentum and leaves residents scared to death of anyone with a badge—or a microphone or notepad. “To this day, the question remains: How could two people get gunned down in front of so many people, and two years later, no one’s been charged?” [KCTV Kansas City anchor Craig] Nigrelli wonders. “The answer is, no one will talk. ‘No Snitch’ is loud and powerful here.”

Investigative reporters in all corners of the country are increasingly encountering the Stop Snitching campaign—spread through word of mouth, DVDs and T-shirts—that makes their jobs that much more difficult. And as digital media means that testimony on the evening news can exist on the Web forever—and be distributed virally to an array of devices—many believe it won’t be getting easier to produce eyewitnesses.

WCAU Philadelphia investigative reporter Harry Hairston knows about such hostility firsthand. While reporting a story a few years ago about a white man who’d moved to a mostly black neighborhood in Chester, Pa., and was being harassed by neighbors who did not want him there, Hairston returned to the station van after doing his reporting to the jarring sight of a cinderblock that had been thrown through his windshield. “Their message was, leave us alone,” he says. “They did not want the media reporting on what was going on.”