Viewers to a KillAs you point out, the “stop snitching” phenomenon has been popularized by the HBO series, The Wire. Do you have a sense of whether the show gets it right? My mention of The Wire was meant to be a reference point for readers unfamiliar with the phenomenon. But the show is very popular, especially in Baltimore where almost everybody—certainly the police—watches it. People I talked to on the street seemed to watch it and like it. They felt like somebody was finally telling their story. Until I started reporting and was told repeatedly that I needed to see it, I had never watched the show. The show wasn’t what brought me to the issue—but that said, now having watched it, I must say it’s incredibly well done. As far as I can tell, it’s almost completely accurate. After I started my reporting, I picked up David Simon’s book The Homicide, which deals with reluctant witnesses. He really knows Baltimore and those neighborhoods and I think The Wire captures the related issues extremely well. Maybe there are a few things in the show that are a bit more extreme than they are in real life, but for the most part they’re not. After all, a lot of the show’s plotline is based on real events. You mentioned before that the Stop Fucking Snitching DVD wasn’t intended to be a piece of propaganda; rather, it was meant to be more of a documentary. Has the “Keep Talking” DVD had any of its intended effect? I think it’s had very little of its intended effect, though it’s won a number of awards from various police associations. I think it’s a clever thing for law enforcement to have tried, but Stop Fucking Snitching gained momentum because it had so much street credibility. By its very nature, anything produced by the cops is not going to have very much street credibility, if any at all. It was certainly creative, but was it effective in getting people to talk to the police? Not very. It may have been effective in other important ways—like publicizing some of the arrests that the police had made. I guess it was a way for cops to say, “Look. See those guys who appeared in Stop Fucking Snitching? We’ve taken them off the street. We’re safer as a result.” It was essentially an attempt by the police to show the drug lords that they had the upper hand, a way for them to prove that they could fight back too. So it was effective, I guess, in that sense. You note in the piece that law enforcement increasingly cannot count on people to come forward out of a sense of civic duty, and that those who do come forward are usually motivated by other things. Both Dowery and Bassett came forward in the hopes of getting a lighter sentence on their criminal charges. I know this kind of deal making is prevalent all across the justice system, but did you encounter many people who strongly believe that this kind of rewards system is dangerous? Yes, many defense attorneys think it’s a dangerous thing and are really opposed to it. They feel that if the prosecutors roll over too easily to make a deal, then it creates perverse incentives. And, of course, people lie to get these deals. Most defense attorneys seem to agree that this is a system that encourages people to lie. There are also some academics who feel that there’s something morally wrong to have such a system in place—that it subverts justice. But if you talk to prosecutors across the country, you’ll find that they all use this system to some extent and, as you say, it’s not limited to this area. It’s extremely prevalent across all levels and types of law enforcement and, truthfully, I don’t see how one gets around it. I do think you have to be careful, though, and I do take the defense attorneys’ point that the practice can be abused. It’s just a hard thing to get around. Congress has tried to make things better, by instating mandatory minimums as an attempt to reduce the number of people who get reductions in their jail time for testifying. The problem is that such deal making has proven to be an effective law enforcement tactic; without it, it would be very difficult to get anybody off the streets for crimes. And it’s not the case that every single person who does cut a deal is lying. You point out attempts that certain legislatures like Maryland are making to pass stricter witness intimidation laws. What exactly are these laws? Why are they facing so much opposition? On face value, it seems that enforcing stronger measures against witness intimidation would be pretty uncontroversial. Actually, the Maryland effort was incredibly controversial. When it comes to protecting witnesses, I think everyone is pretty much in agreement. I don’t think anybody is against providing more money for witness assistance or more federal protection. The opposition hinges on a different issue: whether prosecutors should be allowed to introduce statements from a witness when they’re not present in court, when they’re not there to be cross-examined. That is extremely controversial. Defense attorneys, not surprisingly, are for the most part very opposed to that measure. The compromise reached in Maryland stated that prosecutors could introduce a witness’s prior statements and evidence even if he or she doesn’t appear in court, provided that the attorney can prove to a judge, by clear and convincing evidence, that the defendant had something to do with the witness’s absence in court. Now that’s already a pretty high standard and even prosecutors complain that such a standard of evidence is too hard to prove. Still, defense attorneys were very upset about the compromise. They feel that defendants have a constitutional right to question their accusers and that it’s a violation of their rights to have any evidence introduced without the responsible witness there to vouch for it or be cross-examined on it. There is also opposition against attempts to increase penalties for witness intimidation. Defense attorneys feel that what prosecutors sometimes call intimidation—wearing “Stop Snitching” paraphernalia or shooting hard looks at a witness—doesn’t always rise to that standard and that heavy penalties should really be reserved for explicit acts of violence. But in federal courts, prosecutors are free to introduce statements from witnesses who aren’t present, right? Right. In federal proceedings, under certain circumstances, it is allowed. The federal court has a much more lenient standard than many state courts for introducing that sort of evidence. Still, a lot of people disagree with the federal standard, too. Can you elaborate at all on how certain cities are making a case for prohibiting “Stop Snitching” paraphernalia? How did Washington, D.C. manage to ban these T-shirts? Under what prosecutable category does this fall? Frankly, I’m still not sure how D.C. managed to get away with it. In other cities where the same effort has been made, the American Civil Liberties Union has been fairly effective in shutting it down as a violation of free speech. In other cases, it’s been stopped by intimidation coming from law enforcement. Police will threaten the stores with something else in order to get them to stop selling the stuff. That’s ironic. Yeah. I know that police have been known to go visit some of the places that sell these urban fashions and basically say, “Hey, we think this is a bad idea. You’re encouraging a criminal element here and if you don’t want trouble on other things then why don’t you stop selling it.” I think they argue that the shirts themselves represent a form of intimidation and that storeowners could be held criminally or civilly liable for selling them. Putting aside John Dowery’s death, which I imagine was by far the biggest surprise you encountered, what were the most surprising things you learned throughout this process? I was really surprised by how violent some of these threats and acts were against witnesses. The phenomenon was far bigger than I expected. Some of the examples I encountered were really horrifying. Dowery’s case was really terrible and there were others, too, that I found just shocking. The level of violence that’s routine in some of these areas is truly astonishing. I was also surprised to see how bad some of these neighborhoods really are—the conditions they’re in, it’s just appalling. Some of the housing projects I went—they were, well, not quite as bad as the developing world, but pretty close. Did you take any specific steps to try and protect your sources? Were you at all concerned about endangering them—especially given their own fears of talking to you? I wasn’t too worried at first, but once I felt how much resistance I was encountering, I became more aware. Sometimes, I would talk to people out on the street, but in most cases, they wanted me to come into their houses. They asked me to be very discreet about entering and leaving. It took me a while to realize that just talking to a white person was a bit scary for them. They seemed to automatically assume I was a cop or that people who saw us talking would assume I was a cop. I became a lot more conscious of making sure my sources felt safe. I’d try calling them up on the phone first before meeting them, or I’d ask them if they preferred to meet at their house or somewhere else outside of the neighborhood. Edna McAbier, a victim of witness intimidation I mention in the piece, was extremely careful about who she met and how she met with them. I was careful to respect that and accommodate her. You mentioned just now that most people immediately assumed you were a cop because you’re white. I had imagined—maybe mistakenly—that many of the cops who work in these neighborhoods are black. They are. Baltimore has a really integrated police department, though the homicide division, while also integrated, seems to still have more white officers than black officers. And the homicide operations squad that I accompanied—they go out specifically to look for witnesses—was all white. I found that surprising. The other ride-along I did was with a squad of guys whose job it is to look for witnesses in nonfatal shootings. Those guys were all black plainclothes officers. I found that interesting, too. Did you notice other differences between the two squads? I definitely noticed a difference in their approaches. Some of that is probably explained by the fact that white officers aren’t able to blend into these neighborhoods, so there’s less of a reason to try and hide the fact that they’re cops. Everyone knows they’re cops right away, even though they don’t ride around in marked cars or wear uniforms. The black officers could hang out in a place and not necessarily be identified as cops—not right away, at least. They were able to operate a bit more under the radar. Once people realized they were cops, did you notice people responding differently even then? No. Generally speaking, these communities don’t like cops. Period. You’ll hear people say, “It’s not a white or black thing; it’s a blue thing.” People seem to be undiscriminating when it comes to this. In one neighborhood I visited in southeast Baltimore, people were talking about police-community relations and how bad some of the cops were—and those cops were black, not white. The difference I noticed most was really in the approaches taken by the officers towards the people they were trying to arrest—usually witnesses who had failed to show up in court. I found that the black officers were just a little bit more empathetic than the white officers, who seemed to treat these witnesses as they would treat all other criminals. The black officers didn’t approach these guys as though they had committed serious crimes. They understood these guys were witnesses, that for legitimate reasons, they were afraid. They made it clear they had to come into court—it was their civic responsibility and required under law. But they were less aggressive than the white officers. Of course, this could have more to do personality differences than with race. I only accompanied two squads and in those cases, these differences happened to break down racial lines. What’s the outlook for the federal prosecution trial? Do you have a sense as to whether Dowery’s death will be a significant loss for the prosecution? I don’t really know what the outlook is. I don’t know if it will happen on time—the federal prosecutors have asked for a delay in the trial; the defense has opposed that delay. As of a couple weeks ago, the judge hadn’t ruled either way. How big of a loss was Dowery’s death to the prosecution’s case? It’s hard to say. I know the prosecution had been very interested in having him testify in the federal trial and had been providing him with federal assistance to make that happen. They’ve also been very quiet with regards to what they have on this drug conspiracy. It’s not exactly the same case as the one that was tried in state court because it’s not dealing specifically with James Wise’s murder—it’s really about heroin distribution. The first shooting of Dowery will be part of that case, and it appears that the prosecutors have built a pretty strong case against one of the shooters. Damon West, who police believe was the other man who came to Dowery’s door that October morning, recently pled guilty in state court to having been involved in shooting Dowery. He hasn’t been sentenced yet, but his plea agreement is under seal, so most people believe that he is likely to flip and testify for the prosecution in the upcoming federal trial. Depending on what he says, his testimony could be pretty strong evidence against the defense. On the other hand, he has the same credibility issues that all these guys have. It’s just hard to know. Abigail Cutler is an Atlantic Monthly staff editor.
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