So Many Crimes, and Reasons to Not Cooperate
DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
NY Times
12/30/07
CAMDEN, N.J. — When her 16-year-old son was shot dead on a street corner here in June, Rosalynn Glasco became the latest mother left to search for justice in a world without witnesses — where the stigma of being seen as a snitch or the fear of retaliation prevents many from testifying about even the worst crimes.
But Ms. Glasco held out some hope, all the same. Determined not to let her son’s killer go unpunished, she urged her daughter and other relatives to work the grapevine in the neighborhood where he was killed, Whitman Park, searching for evidence, and maybe somebody willing to share it.
Discovering nothing, she pressed on.
Ms. Glasco’s extended family put together fliers and started assembling a Web site to publicize a reward. She gathered her life savings and set the figure for information at $5,000. She delayed posting it because Camden detectives asked her to wait, saying they had promising leads in the investigation.
The leads fizzled; a trip to see the mayor produced more promises of effort, but no arrests. The murder of Ms. Glasco’s son, Salahuddin Igwe — shot at 5 a.m. as he walked home from a party — remains unsolved.
Ms. Glasco is disappointed. She is also realistic. If the tables were turned, she admits, and if another mother were at her doorstep asking for information, she is not sure she would help, either.
“Snitching, telling on people, isn’t something that I personally would involve myself with,” she said in an interview last week. “People don’t want to talk to you if they think you’re a snitch. If they were your friends, they’re not your friends anymore. You’re left totally all alone.”
As the most violent neighborhood in one of the nation’s most dangerous cities, the Whitman Park section of Camden is on the front lines of the struggle with witness intimidation. An array of powerful forces converge here to discourage people from cooperating with the investigation of crimes — crimes committed against their own homes, their own neighbors, their own children.
Drugs are sold openly from street corners and abandoned row houses. Gunfire is a neighborhood soundtrack. And the competing gangs that control Whitman Park have made it clear that the price for defying them is death. Within blocks of the street where Ms. Glasco’s son was killed, six people were murdered in less than a year.
Yet many residents of Whitman Park say their reluctance to help investigators is based on more than just fear of gang retaliation. It is also a consequence of their deep distrust of the local police and prosecutors and politicians. Like residents of many other struggling, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods across the country, people here complain that racial profiling, police corruption and the excesses of the war on drugs have made them suspicious of virtually any arm of government.
Atmosphere of Distrust
It was here in Whitman Park, after all, that a once-lauded community police officer was sentenced to prison last year for robbing drug dealers. And it was here that Gov. Christie Whitman was photographed frisking a young black man who had been falsely suspected of carrying drugs, an image that surfaced publicly in 2000 and came to symbolize New Jersey law enforcement’s longstanding practice of racial profiling.
And that is not all. The neighborhood’s grim economic and social realities, which have convinced any number of young people here that drug dealing is the best job available, leaves many law-abiding residents with conflicting loyalties.
There are so many people in the neighborhood with friends or relatives in the drug business that to help police arrest a dealer may jeopardize a family’s financial security.
It adds up, the police say, to an environment where they encounter people who, however much they despise the gangs, are more comfortable coexisting with the Bloods, Crips or Latin Kings than assisting the police.
“There’s a lot of history and a lot of reasons for people to stay quiet that are hard to understand unless you’re from there,” said Capt. Al Handy of the Camden police. “We’ve been trying to work with people and win back the trust. But it’s a long, long process.”
The social stigma against helping the police has become an exasperating obstacle confronting officials as they try to combat increased gang violence in urban communities. According to Deputy Attorney General Hester Agudosi, who supervises New Jersey’s 21 county prosecutor’s offices, the number of witnesses who remain silent because they fear for their safety is probably less than one-tenth the number who refuse to talk because they fear the social repercussions.
One small, glaring symptom of the dilemma is the “Stop Snitchin’” movement, an underground effort, popularized in rap videos and with T-shirts, urging criminals not to testify against other suspects in exchange for more lenient sentences. But the sense of estrangement is far broader, crossing generational lines and testing the consciences of people whose only involvement with crime is as a victim or potential witness.
“A lot of white Americans from suburban communities can’t understand why people wouldn’t talk to law enforcement,” said Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who is studying witness intimidation for the National District Attorneys Association. “But in a lot of inner-city communities, there is so much hostility to the police that many people of color can’t fathom why someone would even seriously consider helping them.”
In Whitman Park, a neighborhood of less than half a square mile that is home to 6,000 people, young men in black hooded sweatshirts are a fixture on street corners and front stoops, openly flagging down drivers to offer cocaine. Of the 43 murders that the Camden police have reported this year, seven have occurred there.
The reasons for not talking about those murders — or other crimes — can be varied.
“Let’s say you make a police report and they run your name and find out you have a warrant from five or six years ago you forgot about,” said Verdell Peterson, 52. “In this neighborhood, $250 is a lot of money, and if you don’t have it to pay your bail, you’re going to sit in jail until someone else does.”
‘You Might Get Killed’
But many say that steering clear of the police is a matter of trust, and survival.
Neil Reynolds, 18, said that his upbringing in Whitman Park taught him that “the wrong friends will get you shot and cops will get you shot or locked up.”
“If you talk to the police, you might get killed,” said Mr. Reynolds, who has a record for narcotics sales but says he is now trying to leave the drug business. But even those who aren’t physically harmed, he said, face repercussions. “No one wants anything to do with you, because when they get in trouble, they think you’ll tell on them, too.”
At Community Baptist Church, where funeral services have been held for a half-dozen of Whitman Park’s murder victims in recent years, the Rev. David King said an entire generation of Whitman Park children were being raised to fear the police.
Working from a run-down building with oil poured on unused doorways to prevent narcotics dealers from congregating, Mr. King runs anti-gang and drug rehabilitation programs and urges church members to keep an open mind about the police. But last month, when a police officer who is well known and well liked at the church crashed his car out front, Mr. King said he was dismayed to see neighborhood children cheering.
“All they could see was his uniform,” he said.
Police and prosecutors have tried various strategies to regain the trust of Camden residents in recent years. The Shooting Response Team, which quickly floods the scene of any gun crime with a crew of city, county and state investigators, has been credited with an improved response to gun crimes. Statistics indicate that the department has tripled its success in solving shootings, to 42 percent in 2006 from 14 percent in 2003.
But efforts to strengthen the community policing efforts in the neighborhood and start a neighborhood watch program were set back late last year when the officer assigned to Whitman Park, Cpl. Michael Hearne, was arrested on charges that he and an accomplice had been robbing drug dealers at gunpoint.
Corporal Hearne pleaded guilty and is serving a seven-year prison term.
Even those residents who are willing to trust the police can be dissuaded from reporting drug activity to the authorities because narcotics have become such an integral part of Whitman Park’s economy. Steven Carmichael, a postal carrier who is acting president of the United Neighbors of Whitman Park, said that in many instances people are ambivalent because they want to drive off the drug dealers, but are friends with their parents.
“Do you say something to the parent? But maybe the parents already know and are afraid to put the kid out on the street where he might get shot or killed,” said Mr. Carmichael, whose cousin across town was killed by rival drug dealers last year. “Or maybe the parents are out of work and don’t ask where he gets that money so long as it helps them put food on the table. From the outside it seems black and white, but out here, things get complicated.”
Things certainly got complicated for Mr. Carmichael after his cousin’s death.
“I couldn’t go to the funeral because people know I try to help the police,” he said.
In November, when detectives were stymied in the case of 12-year-old boy killed in a Camden housing project, investigators brought the child’s mother up from Florida to canvass the neighborhood in hopes that a “mother to mother” conversation with people near the scene of the shooting might encourage witnesses to come forward.
The case remains unsolved.
Little Help From the Top
Ms. Glasco had hoped to help her son Salahuddin, known as Sal, avoid the temptations and perils of Camden, and so in 2005 she moved with him to Lindenwold, a suburb. Although his father is in prison and his sister has had brushes with the law, Sal was the child who everyone had hoped might at least escape the city.
One of Sal’s jobs was at the Boys and Girls Club of Cherry Hill, near Whitman Park. He frequently spent the night at his sister’s home, on Thurman Street, and socialized with friends down the block.
One June night he never made it back to his sister’s. Ms. Glasco eventually found herself on the telephone with a detective, who, she recalled, “told me that he was sorry to inform me that my son had been killed.”
From the outset of the investigation, detectives warned the family that witnesses would be difficult to come by. But Ms. Glasco was adamant that she was “not going to let this one go.”
So she went looking for witnesses.
“I wanted to let them know this was about a mother and her son,” she said. “And maybe that would make them do the right thing.”
She and her relatives would shake loose a nickname of a potential suspect, but turn up little else. The police did little better.
A meeting in September with Mayor Gwendolyn A. Faison offered one glimmer of hope when the mayor picked up the telephone a few minutes into the conversation and got the deputy police commissioner on the line. There was little follow-up, however, and Ms. Faison said she wasn’t surprised: Camden’s government has been under state supervision for nearly 20 years because of corruption, so the police do not report to her.
“I can call, and I did,” Mayor Faison said, “but I have no authority over them.”
The Camden police declined to discuss the case, but the Camden County prosecutors say they are satisfied with the detectives’ work and optimistic that they’re moving toward an arrest.
Since her son’s death, Ms. Glasco said, she is often not certain where to focus her anger. She is infuriated with the killer and frustrated with the police. She is anguished by the thought that someone knows who is responsible, but is too scared or cynical to come forward. And she is honest enough to understand why they might not.
Still, she pleads.
“People have to put themselves in my shoes,” she said. “I’m a mother with a dead kid. And the person who did it is out there, smiling, thinking that they got it made.”
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