Snitching in black and white

A comment posted in response to William Kaempffer's May 7^th report on the formation of a new intelligence gathering unit within the New Haven police department strongly suggested that crime is forever in our city, and that the citizens of the "'hood" would never part their lips to help bring criminals to justice. The commentator implies that perpetrators are known, but will never be snitched or squealed on. That may or may not be true, but I do know that there are circumstances when folks in the hood appreciate a snitch: when the villain or suspected ne'er-do-well is white.

I lived in Chicago, and then Evanston, the suburb immediately to the north of the Second City for over twenty years. I lived there in July of 1999 when white supremacist Benjamin Smith gunned down Ricky Byrdsong, the former head basketball coach of Northwestern University as he jogged with his children. His shooting hit close to home, for I had just met Byrdsong a few weeks before his death. We ran into each other while we were each chaperoning our kids at a local carnival in Skokie. We talked about parenting and church, and the possibility of his joining a local Christian men's group that I had formed, so the news of his murder was a shock. The nature of his murder, shot because of the color of his skin, cut close to the bone for me also because my feelings were still raw, a year after the 1998 lynching of James Byrd and the subsequent trial and guilty verdict of the three white men accused of the heinous crime. Byrd and Byrdsong, along with the other victims of Smith's three day rampage, were targets simply because of the color of their skin or their ethnicity. Never did "there but for the grace of God" seem so real to me.

So visceral was my sense of vulnerability and anger that I wrote a pointed letter to the editor of one of Evanston's local papers that placed the responsible for these crimes at the feet of the white community that spawned people like Smith. I reasoned that I did not live in the tony community where Smith grew up. Because of that reality chances are that I would not have worshipped at his community church, or shopped at the same supermarket, or played in the same local parks. No, I could do nothing to counter the twisted mindset that made it okay for Smith to kill people like me. No, the people for that particular assignment looked like Smith. They went to school with him, played with him, maybe even worshiped with him. It was these people who needed to step up and snitch and squeal and deal with the aberrant element in their midst.

Why would the same not be true in the black community? Yes, the police need to be on their job, but chances are, when the murder victim is black, the murderer is, also. And somebody knows something or someone mixed up in it. If the white community that hatched a Benjamin Smith needed to buck up and take significant responsibility for his attitudes and subsequent actions so, too, must the black community in New Haven must face into the harsh reality that there are brothers and sisters in our midst who must be held to account for the evil that they do. Something has got to give. Somebody's got to snitch.