Guest blogger

NPR’s “This American Life” recently posted an interview with NYPD police officer Adrian Schoolcraft, who secretly recorded conversations at Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 81st Precinct. Schoolcraft’s recordings were originally published by the Village Voice, and became the subject of a five-part expose of the Bed-Stuy police’s practices. The Schoolcraft tapes revealed the extent to which modern policing is driven by a series of arrest quotas rather than increasing the quality of life for the residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Perversely, the 81st Precinct’s overzealous attention to the reported crime figures drove up arrests for minor crime, at the same time as driving down charges for major crimes. Put differently, the emphasis was on both the number of arrests made (busywork for the police) while at the same time proclaiming that serious crime rates were down (so reclassifying serious crimes as less severe, so as to undercut fear of crime).

Schoolcraft is a snitch: he broke the police’s own stop snitching code, the Blue Line of silence. Rarely mentioned in the snitching debates is that the police have, and celebrate, their own stop snitching code, one that is expressly designed to hide illegal or quasi-illegal activities from public scrutiny. The Blue Line is in some ways disturbingly thick: it serves not only to separate but also to distance the police from the rest of the public. The Blue Line separates the police from the public by reinforcing negative police stereotypes of the people with whom they interact on a daily basis. The Blue Line distances the police from the public by turning a blind eye to forcible and arbitrary displays of authority, of the sort that, as demonstrated in the “This American Life” interview, delegitimize the police in the eyes of the public.

Dr. Rick Frei’s “Snitching Study,” which I blogged about earlier in the week, produced an interesting statistic that is relevant here: 60% of interviewees considered it permissible to snitch on cops. That statistic is borne out, anecdotally at least, by Schoolcraft’s experience: “This American Life” revealed that Bed-Stuy residents were willing to tell him who were the cops engaged in improper policing practices. Of course, the Blue Line at the same time discounts and disvalues citizen reports on the police, while possessing the information that confirms such reports, and while enforcing police refusal to snitch on other police officers.

The impact of Schoolcraft’s revelations should not be understated. First, they bolster some statistical data from a report entitled “New York City Police Department’s ‘Stop and Frisk’ Practices,” also known as the Spitzer Report. That report found that only 61 percent of police stops cited constitutionally adequate grounds for a stop-and-frisk, with 39 percent adducing constitutionally insufficient or indeterminate grounds. Schoolcraft’s tapes suggest that the police engaged in a stop first, find probable cause (or reasonable suspicion) later policy, applied randomly to the Bed-Stuy residents.

A second feature of Schoolcraft’s recording campaign is to note that while police have become increasingly fond of police-initiated recordings, e.g., car mounted cameras, they have become increasingly suspicious of citizen-initiated recordings, using mobile phones. Here again, the citizenry undermine and question police authoritarianism through the use of camera phones to challenge, or snitch on, police-citizen encounters. There is currently a lawsuit pending in Maryland, where an officer is suing for invasion of privacy a citizen who recorded a police stop and snitched.

The authoritarian element underlying both policing by numbers and the Blue Line of silence is precisely the authoritarianism necessary for the sort of policing that relies upon snitches and confessions. Schoolcraft, and other “Good Cops” like him (to use the title of a book by David Harris) do not engage in forcible policing, but consensual policing. They do not need to use their cuffs to establish their authority. Instead of driving away all sources of information except those willing to talk for a price, policing could develop relations by engaging with the people they police. Schoolcraft’s recording suggests that consensual policing has fallen victim to policing by numbers, and at least in the 81st Precinct, officers were encouraged to cut corners but not snitch on each other at the same time they demand that the citizens they mistreated act as snitches.

Dr. Rick Frei, a professor at the Community College of Philadelphia, recently conducted a study (“The Snitching Study“) of over 1,500 community college students to determine whether there was widespread agreement among the students as to the definition of “snitching,” and what factors would increase or decrease the likelihood that a student would “snitch” on someone they knew to have committed a crime. Professor Frei also testified before the United States Senate’s Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs as to the result of his survey.

The study confirmed that most students (82.6%) regarded “ratting on someone else to get out of a crime” as snitching; whereas less than a third (28.6%) regarded “picking a suspect out of a police lineup” as snitching. While that last figure still seems higher than optimal, it is perhaps explained by another of the survey’s findings, that “half the sample said they did not trust the police,” even though 60% of respondents claimed to know a police officer personally.

Two factors in particular stood out for me. First was that “[t]he more the situation required the person to take the initiative … the more likely it was to be viewed as snitching.” (Dr. Frei’s Testimony before the Subcommittee). Least likely to be viewed as snitching (16%) was ‘[a]nswering questions from the police if you are at the scene of the crime.” Here, the student’s definition of snitching seemed to track the ACLU’s distinction between acting as an informant and acting as a witness. That may have important ramifications for the manner in which the police engage in gathering evidence from people with knowledge of criminal activity.

The second striking factor from the study was that “[n]early half of all students said that they would be more likely to cooperate if there was someone besides the police to which they could report crimes.” This factor appears to bolster the idea that the students surveyed tend to distrust the police, or perhaps what the police would do with the information — many students were less likely to snitch if the crime was non-violent. One obvious response would be to set up tipster hotlines that are not directly identified with the police, and which individuals reporting crimes could use to report incidents. Another way to approach the same problem may be to make such tipster hotlines anonymous. Anonymity impacts the most important factor inhibiting the students from acting as informants: almost thirty percent of students said they would be less likely to snitch if it would affect their reputation in the community. There are some worrying practical and legal problems with hotlines, however, and in particular anonymous tips, that I shall consider in a later post.

I’m so pleased to introduce guest blogger Professor Eric Miller, from St. Louis University School of Law. His scholarship focuses on policing, race, and drug enforcement–key issues in the informant policy world. Readers may be particularly interested in this piece: Role-Based Policing: Restraining Police Conduct “Outside the Legitimate Investigative Sphere,” 94 Cal. L. Rev. 617 (2006), in which Professor Miller thinks about the many informal ways that police interact with suspects and citizens. He’ll be with us for October.

My thanks to Alexandra Natapoff for the opportunity to contribute to this blog. Like many folks thinking about the complex range of social attitudes to snitching, I have been deeply influenced by Alexandra’s writing on the subject, and in particular, her article “Snitching: The Institutional and Communal Consequences.” That being said, while I share her focus on the criminal aspects of snitching, I’d also like to throw in some examples from time to time that exhibit the breadth of snitching depictions in our culture. So I’ll begin with a slightly lengthy post to set out my general take on snitching.

Think, for example of the popular AMC series Mad Men, set in a Madison Avenue advertising firm during the 1960s, as an extended meditation on the disvalue of snitching. Each of the central characters has a secret, many of them criminal or quasi-criminal (at the time), and none more so than the hero of the piece, Don Draper, who is a deserter from the Army during the Korean War living under an assumed identity. Yet at pivotal moments throughout the four seasons of Mad Men, other characters have found out Don’s secret and refused to snitch. I don’t think it too much of a stretch to suggest that one of the major attractions of the series is precisely our interest in seeing if someone will snitch on Don. If this is a plausible characterization of Mad Men, then the show advances – and the audience’s response confirms – the value of not-snitching as a major part of our culture.

More strikingly, we tend to think that the folks who refuse to snitch – Don’s ex-wife Betty Francis, Don’s former boss and now partner, Bert Cooper, Don’s colleague Pete Campbell, and so on – are doing the right thing. Why?

Two aspects of snitching (or informing or whistleblowing, to put it in neutral or even positive terms) are brought out by the series: first, snitching undermines trust and second, it can have very severe personal and social consequences.

Here I should issue a quick spoiler alert for those who haven’t got to the latest episode from the current season, “Hands and Knees.” That episode was all about the central issues of snitching: secrets and trust (“loyalty” as discussed on the Wall Street Journal’s Mad Men blog, hosted by Walter Dellinger ). What stood out in the episode was the – at times odd – refusal of friends, colleagues, family, and even enemies (the categories are not mutually exclusive) to snitch on Don.

A central motivation of the characters in that episode was that the consequences of snitching fall not only on Don, but on each of them too. For example, Betty’s new marriage has already hit some bumps, particularly in relation to her husband, Henry Francis’s political ambitions. He may be unable to trust her if he finds out she married him wile knowing Don was a deserter. The consequences are perhaps even greater for the seedy Pete Campbell: if Pete snitches, Don will disappear, destroying the firm and Pete’s fledgling career. Pete swallows the loss of his major client and, during a partner’s meeting, sucks up Roger Sterling’s vitriol to avoid snitching. Such deference makes economic sense: while taking a hit in the short term, Pete clearly hopes Don will bring in more money down the road.

But Pete’s self interest also depends upon Don’s loyalty: Pete trusts that Don will both remain Don Draper, the mercurial creative force that drives the profits, and remain at the firm. For Betty, too, there is a need to maintain trust if life is to continue uninterrupted. The question the Federal Agents ask her regards Don’s loyalty: is he generally someone in which she (and the nation) should place its trust. So long as she can trust him to remain Don, her marriage is secure.

So how does all this relate to police and policing? The point is that snitching – which Alexandra defines as the “very specific law enforcement practice of rewarding informants by forgiving them their crimes” – operates against a social background of trust-based moral values and self-interested calculations of profit, loss, and personal security. Snitching eviscerates trust, and while it may increase the security or profitability of discrete individuals in the course of what Alexandra calls the “information-liability exchange between informants and the government,” it may threaten the security or profitability of the group as a whole.
In the case of Mad Men, the relevant group is Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (the advertising firm at the heart of the story) along with Betty’s family life. But in the real world, the relevant groups include fragile communities of families and friends, often living in economically and legally equivocal circumstances. We easily empathize with the rich, suave, middle-class, white deserter Don Draper (and are encouraged to do so by the writers); we may not so easily empathize with the poor, working-class, minorities who are often the subjects of diatribes about snitching (and are often encouraged by this in media depictions of criminals and anti-snitching).

Yet anti-snitching may seek to preserve the interests of the group over the interests of the individual – particularly when, as Alexandra points out in her great article, the snitches are not usually the innocent bystanders or victims of crime, but its perpetrators. The police must be trusted to do the right thing and protect the community’s security: if the snitches are themselves perceived as enemies of the community, or the consequences as socially destructive, then anti-snitching makes good moral and practical (prudential) sense. While I am not suggesting that snitching is always morally or prudentially justified, I am endorsing the thought that the picture is not so simple as the media often portrays it.

Many thanks for Michael Rich for sharing his work and insights. Additional guest bloggers coming soon.