Bait and SnitchThe high cost of snitching for law

enforcement.
By Alexandra NatapoffPosted Monday, Dec. 12, 2005, at 5:41 PM ET
From Baltimore to Boston to New York; in Pittsburgh, Denver, and Milwaukee, kids are

sporting the ominous fashion statement, prompting local fear, outrage, and fierce arguments

over crime. Several trials have been disrupted by the T-shirts; some witnesses refuse to

testify. Boston's Mayor Thomas M. Menino has declared a ban: "We're going into every retail

store that sells them," he declared to the Boston Globe, "and we're going to take them off the

shelves." With cameo appearances in the growing controversy by NBA star Carmelo

Anthony of the Denver Nuggets and the rapper Lil Kim, snitching is making urban culture
headlines.

The "Stop Snitchin' " T-shirt drama looks, at first blush, like a dustup over a simple

counterculture message launched by some urban criminal entrepreneurs: that friends don't

snitch on friends. But it is, in fact, a symptom of a more insidious reality that has largely

escaped public notice: For the last 20 years, state and federal governments have been

creating criminal snitches and setting them loose in poor, high-crime communities. The

backlash against snitches embodies a growing national recognition that snitching is dangerous

public policy—producing bad information, endangering innocent people, letting dangerous

criminals off the hook, compromising the integrity of police work, and inciting violence and

distrust in socially vulnerable neighborhoods.

The heart of the snitching problem lies in the secret deals that police and prosecutors make

with criminals. In investigating drug offenses, police and prosecutors rely heavily—and

sometimes exclusively—on criminals willing to trade information about other criminals in

exchange for leniency. Many snitches avoid arrest altogether, thus continuing to use and deal

drugs and commit other crimes in their neighborhoods, while providing information to the

police. As drug dockets swell and police and prosecutors become increasingly dependent on

snitches, high-crime communities are filling up with these active criminals who will turn in

friends, family, and neighbors in order to "work off" their own crimes.

Critics of the T-shirts tend to dismiss the "stop snitching" sentiment as pro-criminal

andantisocial; a subcultural expression of misplaced loyalty. But the T-shirts should be heeded

as evidence of a failed public policy. Snitching is an entrenched law-enforcement practice that

has become pervasive due to its crucial role in the war on drugs. This practice is favored not

only by police and prosecutors, but by legislatures: Mandatory minimum sentences

and restrictions on judges make snitching one of the only means for defendants to negotiate in

the face of rigid and drastic sentences. But the policy has turned out to be a double-edged

sword. Nearly every drug offense involves a snitch, and snitching is increasingly displacing

more traditional police work, such as undercover operations and independent investigation.

According to some agents and prosecutors, snitching is also slowly crippling law enforcement:

"[I]nformers are running today's drug investigations, not the agents," says veteran DEA

agent Celerino Castillo. "Agents have become so dependent on informers that the agents are

at their mercy." According to a study conducted by professor Ellen Yaroshefsky of Cardozo Law

School, some prosecutors actually "fall in love with their rats." A prosecutor in the study

describes the phenomenon: "You are not supposed to, of course. But you spend time with this

guy, you get to know him and his family. You like him. [T]he reality is that the cooperator's

information often becomes your mindset." In this view, criminal snitching is a sort of

Frankenstein's monster that has turned on and begun to consume its law enforcement creator.

The government's traditional justification for creating criminal snitches—"we-need-to-flip-little-

fishes-to-get-to-the-Big-Fish"—is at best an ideal and mostly the remnant of one. Today,

the government lets all sorts of criminals, both big and little, trade information to escape

punishment for nearly every kind of crime, and often the snitches are more dangerous than

the targets. As reported by Wall Street Journal reporter Laurie Cohen last year: "The big fish

gets off and the little fish gets eaten. ... [T]he procedure for deciding who gets [rewarded for

cooperation] is often haphazard and tilted toward higher-ranking veteran criminals who can

tell prosecutors what they want to know."

Snitching thus puts us right through the looking glass: Criminals direct police investigations

while avoiding arrest and punishment. Nevertheless, snitching is ever more popular with law

enforcement: It is easier to "flip" defendants and turn them into snitches than it is to fight

over their cases. For a criminal system that has more cases than it can litigate, and more

defendants than it can incarcerate, snitching has become a convenient case-management tool

for an institution that has bitten off more than it can chew.

And while the government's snitching policy has gone mostly unchallenged, it is both

damaging to the justice system and socially expensive. Snitches are famously unreliable:

A 2004 study by the Northwestern University Law School's Center on Wrongful Convictions

reveals that 46 percent of wrongful death penalty convictions are due to snitch misinformation

—making snitches the leading cause of wrongful conviction in capital cases. Jailhouse

snitches routinely concoct information; the system gives them every incentive to do so. Los

Angeles snitch Leslie White infamously avoided punishment for his crimes for years by

fabricating confessions and attributing them to his cellmates.

Snitches also undermine law-enforcement legitimacy—police who rely on and protect their

informants are often perceived as favoring criminals. In a growing number of public fiascos,

snitches actually invent crimes and criminals in order to provide the government with the

information it demands. In Dallas, for example, in the so-called "fake drug scandal," paid

informants set up innocent Mexican immigrants with fake drugs (gypsum), while police

falsified drug field tests in order to inflate their drug-bust statistics.

Finally, as the T-shirt controversy illustrates, snitching exacerbates crime, violence, and

distrust in some of the nation's most socially vulnerable communities. In the poorest

neighborhoods, vast numbers of young people are in contact with the criminal-justice system.

Nearly every family contains someone who is incarcerated, under supervision, or has a

criminal record. In these communities, the law-enforcement policy of pressuring everyone to

snitch can have the devastating effect of tearing families and social networks apart. Ironically,

these are the communities most in need of positive role models, strong social institutions, and

good police-community relations. Snitching undermines these important goals by setting

criminals loose, creating distrust, and compromising police integrity.

The "Stop Snitchin' " T-shirts have drawn local fire for their perceived threat to law-abiding

citizens who call the police. But in the outrage over that perceived threat, the larger message

of the shirts has been missed: Government policies that favor criminal snitching harm the

communities most in need of law-enforcement protection.

While snitching will never be abolished, the practice could be substantially improved, mostly

by lifting the veil of secrecy that shields law-enforcement practices from public scrutiny. As

things stand, police and prosecutors can cut a deal with a criminal; turn him into a snitch or

cut him loose; forgive his crimes or resurrect them later; release him into the community; or

decide to pick him up. They do all this at their discretion, without legal rules, in complete

secrecy with no judicial or public accountability. As a result, we have no idea whether

snitching even reduces crime or actually increases it, and we can only guess at the collateral

harms it imposes on high-crime communities.

The government should reveal snitching's real costs, including data on how many snitches are

released into high-crime neighborhoods and what sorts of snitch crimes are forgiven. The

government should also be required to establish the concrete benefits of a policy that releases

some criminals to catch others, by accounting for how much crime actually gets stopped or

solved by snitch information. Only then can we rationally evaluate how much government-

sponsored snitching makes sense. Until we can know the real value of snitching, the T-shirts

remain an important reminder that this particular cure for crime may be as bad as the disease.