By Joshunda Sanders
The Austin American-Statesman
AUSTIN — Without witnesses, police can’t solve homicide or drug cases quickly. But in Austin, police and residents say fear that people who cooperate with police will be viewed by their neighbors as snitches has more frequently affected local investigations.
Investigators call those who give police information in exchange for avoiding jail or prison time confidential informants. The word “snitch” gives them pause. “The only people who call it snitching are crooks talking to crooks,” said former Homicide Commander Harold Piatt with the Austin Police Department, who is now retired.
But convicted criminals and everyday citizens seem familiar with an anti-police “Stop Snitching” sentiment that has become widely popular in recent years. The phrase started spreading a few years ago when Denver Nuggets forward Carmelo Anthony urged people to stop cooperating with police on a DVD that spawned “Stop Snitching” T-shirts and Web sites.
More recently, the National Center for Victims of Crime released “Snitches Get Stitches,” a study documenting the difficulty police departments have getting young people to help them solve drug and gang cases.
The “Stop Snitching” sentiment is considered a direct consequence of police investigations of drug- and gang-related crimes in urban communities, said Alexandra Natapoff, a national informant expert and Los Angeles-based law professor.
In local homicide investigations, police say the “Stop Snitching” sentiment might have been a factor in at least three cases in the past year, including the June 19 beating death of 40-year-old house painter David Rivas Morales; the fatal shooting of Ricky Lynn Shepherd Jr. at a gas station near Decker and Loyola lanes on June 29; and the fatal shooting of Priscilla Calderon on July 18.
In each case, police said there were many witnesses at the scene of the crime, but it was a challenge to get any of them to come forward.
Shepherd’s fiancée, Demetria Shepherd, said she was concerned that witnesses were worried about being perceived as snitches when it took awhile for anyone to talk to police.
At a news conference in 2007 about Calderon’s death, Homicide Sgt. Jessica Robledo said fears of being labeled a snitch were delaying the investigation.
In the Shepherd shooting, anonymous tips eventually led to the arrest of Cordele Hopes in August. Two men were charged with capital murder about a week after Calderon’s death: On July 23, Larry Alexander surrendered to police, after Paul Valo Villareal had been arrested on unrelated drug charges the week before. And Kurtiss Colvin was charged in the death of Morales.
Austin police would not say whether the national trend of witnesses refusing to cooperate with police is connected to the DVD, the T-shirts or the Web sites. Natapoff says that snitching is the “idea of the moment” and a concept that has a well-documented underside.
People generally fear intimidation if they are even seen talking to police in some communities, she said.
There is a widespread perception that mostly people of color and young people perpetuate the idea that informants harm, rather than help, investigations, said Joseph McNamara, a national policing expert and research fellow at the Hoover Institute. But he says the anti-police cooperation idea is not confined to minority communities.
“Not snitching is an honorable time-old tradition,” he said.
In Austin, according to local criminal defense lawyer Stephen Orr, “the danger of coming forward is greatly exaggerated.”
People who are reluctant to cooperate with police are either confused about what an informant really is or they don’t trust police, Orr said.
When Mimi Kelly, 31, and her mother found strips of crime scene tape around their apartment complex on Decker Lane in September, Kelly said she sought out police to tell them that she’d heard shots, and that she recognized the car in which they found a man shot in the head.
Kelly, who is black, said she suspected that officers would have difficulty finding other witnesses in her predominately black and Latino Northeast Austin apartment complex.
“People always say ‘don’t snitch’ out here,” she said, “But you should snitch because cooperating with police can help you keep your community safe.”
Homicide Sgt. Hector Reveles agreed: “The irony is that it’s safer to say something about a particular case than to not say it because if suspects know which witnesses know about their crime, those witnesses are in danger because the killer is still out there.”
Copyright 2008 The Austin American-Statesman