Viewers to a Kill
How did you end up making contact with your sources? With John Dowery, for example?
Some people at the prosecutor’s office in Baltimore pointed me in his direction, as an example of a case that hadn’t yet received much attention outside of the city. When I started looking at his case, Dowery was still alive. I first tried to make contact with him through his family in East Baltimore, having found their addresses in the court records. After having one initial tentative conversation with him, I put in another request to talk to him through his family—that’s when he ended up getting killed. It was pretty dramatic. Really shocking and really tragic.
From the story, it looks like you spent a considerable amount of time talking to him—there are just so many details about his life. How did you piece them all together?
I probably spent less time talking to him than you imagine. It had taken me a long time to convince him to talk to me at all. Just tracking him and his family down was difficult—they were hard to get a hold of and very distrustful at first. I really only had one preliminary conversation with him before he was killed. And I was just appalled when it happened. As I write in the piece, it was over Thanksgiving. I was getting closer to the writing stage, but still hoped to have a more extensive talk with him that following week. Over the holiday, I got an email from a communications person at the prosecutor’s office who had come across a little blurb in the paper about the killing. She forwarded it on to me, fearing it was the same John Dowery Jr. I had been following. It became quickly clear that they were the same person.
At that point, I hadn’t planned to focus solely on his case. My plan was to tell the story in a very different manner—not through a single narrative, because I didn’t feel I had really found one with enough depth to cover all the necessary ground. At the time he and I spoke, I was simultaneously reporting on a number of cases, maybe three or four at once. And then, quite tragically, he was killed. It pains me to say it, but his death was absolutely crucial in the way the story ultimately came together. After it happened, I had several more extensive conversations with his family.
Were they more willing to talk to you afterwards?
Yes, I think they were more interested in talking to me about it after it happened. They were in shock, too, and obviously very grief-stricken, and it was hard for them to talk. But they were willing to talk, to me and to The Baltimore Sun—so at that point they came around and helped me fill in lots of the holes. I think they felt there was really something to talk about once he was killed.
How did you get everyone else to talk? I imagine many people would fear talking to anybody about the issue, much less to the press.
It wasn’t easy, let’s put it that way. I’m not sure I was as successful as I would have liked. I found it very difficult to get people to open up. They’re generally distrustful of the press and especially distrustful in those neighborhoods if you’re white. I think they feel mistreated by local media—that crime is the only topic that gets covered, if at all, in their neighborhoods. So they were very distrustful of me. Basically, I found just going there was my best bet. They gave me some credit just for going to their neighborhood and trying to talk to them.
For just showing up, as Mark Bowden might say?
Exactly. For going to where they live and tracking them down. They just seemed to be impressed by that. They were still very suspicious; I had to show them my press pass and previous clips in order to convince them I was who I said I was. I found that some people were very happy to talk about snitching; others weren’t. I also found it was sometimes easier to get them first talking about police-community relations. People seemed more willing to talk freely about that. Then I would segue into how talking to the police was regarded in the neighborhood, what happens to people who do, how acts of witness intimidation are remembered. That ended up being the most successful approach.
I would have liked to interview more people, had it been possible. I tried to get on the prison’s visitor list to talk to Tracy Love and Tamall Parker, but they didn’t seem interested in talking to me. And obviously their lawyers weren’t that keen on my talking to them either.
You note in your piece that the roots of this phenomenon are distinct from those portrayed in mafia culture—that this current iteration of intimidation isn’t just a natural outgrowth of a time-old tradition in organized crime. Can you speak more to the differences?
I think the two are very different. This intimidation has spread beyond those who are involved in criminal enterprises to the community at large, which has not only adopted this ethos but is also enforcing it. Not necessarily through violence, but at least through a social stigma, which is widely enforced by people in the neighborhood. While the violence itself does tend to come from the criminal enterprises—the drug gangs, mostly—entire neighborhoods will ostracize those who talk or snitch to the police. I definitely think it’s different than what you saw before with organized crime.
I found the argument made by David Kennedy [director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice] —that the silence of many witnesses doesn’t come from fear but from anger—especially interesting. Do you agree with this assessment? Do you think it’s possible that members of these communities are willing to let crimes go unpunished out of defiance?
I think that David Kennedy makes some good points. He argues that the distrust between black communities and the government dates back all the way to reconstruction. That’s very much his opinion. I think it’s a little extreme, but I do agree that since the civil rights era there has been a major breakdown in trust and that the war on drugs has really deepened it. There’s a feeling in these communities that as long as the police are only coming in to these neighborhoods to lock people up for drug offenses, there’s no reason that community members should work with the police. The feeling is that the police are somehow undermining the community, destroying the community. Not talking to the police has become a way of fighting back—and it’s a strategy that has been adopted by a large segment of the population, even by those not involved in criminal activity.
At the same time, I think it’s significant that the organized community that used to exist in these neighborhoods has also broken down. That certainly doesn’t help encourage people to talk to the police when there’s no structure to protect them. On top of that, there’s also a sense of indifference. I don’t think the police are totally wrong when they say, “Look, it’s not all fear and it’s not all ‘We hate the police.’ Some of it has to do with people not really caring about their civic responsibilities anymore.” I think there is some truth to that: people feel less committed to these neighborhoods—some of them are transients, they’ve moved around a lot—and less committed to sticking their neck out for their neighbors. There’s definitely an “every person for him/herself” attitude that pervades many of these areas. It’s a very complicated phenomenon with many, many layers. It’s difficult to separate out exactly what the specific drivers are.
Abigail Cutler is an Atlantic Monthly staff editor.
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