Posted on 12/30/2007 7:24:30 AM PST by shrinkermd
“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.
...Camden’s government has been under state supervision for nearly 20 years because of corruption, so the police do not report to her.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Idiotic comment. There is nothing genetic about barbarism. Members of all races have been at times prime examples of the type.
Read Theodore Dalrymple for commentary on the white English underclass, which has pathologies identical to those of the black American underclass.
“Well, don’t worry Hillary, Jesse and Al will solve all their problems.”
You can bet their problems won’t be solved by three self-absorbed crooks.
Not an idiotic comment. It’s no wonder Afica was referred to as the dark continent. And Africans are still practicing slavery today. What are the most positive things that have come out of Africa?
It would take a military occupation to straighten out this mess.
If only the rut would stay the same. It's not. It's getting deeper and deeper. Compare the state of that culture with what it was fifty years ago. Compare the state of our inner cities. They're much worse.
Yes, “Life at the Bottom”. I give the book to liberals who claim that minorities in this country are the way they are because of white racism.
All the leading Democratic presidential candidates have said they would not advise people to turn in illegal immigrants they found out about or had knowledge of, what’s different here?”
I hadn’t heard those quotes.
Now I have even more reason to do just that. There is a local roofing company that has trucks full of non-English speaking “workers”. Time to call them in.
“...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.”
Geeez! 26 words wasted when “It’s Whiteys fault!” would have said the same thing in less space.
They complain when the police cant solve the murders, then when the police ask for help, they proudly wear thier “Stop Snitching” T shirts and embrace the tribal urges.
Africa is admittedly the most barbaric continent today, and admittedly many black Americans are barbaric.
The idiocy comes from claiming that modern Americans are barbaric because (some of) their ancestors hail from Africa and/or that barbarism needs to be imported. We are all capable of it, and as I mentioned identical behavior is common in (white) members of the English underclass.
If black Americans are barbaric because of their genetic inheritance, how do you explain this?
I prefer to think that (modern) barbarism is the consequence of bad ideas, primarily promoted by the intelligentsia, which have very negative effects when sliding down to the underclass. Whatever its color or ancestry.
With this kind of “ethic”, it’s no wonder that white flight takes place when the neighborhood becomes integrated. All you need do is hearken back to a time when the thug culture didn’t exist and notifying the police for the purpose of catching criminals wasn’t known as “snitching”.
I know we are all capable of barbarism. Some of us choose not to be barbaric.
It is the attitude of certain cultures that gets imported. I said nothing about genetics.
(And send all 'miscreants' directly to GITMO).
'Sparky is cheaper -- and so is a length of hemp (not the smoking kind)>
Save me a seat.
You wouldn't be hinting that those three upstanding thugs might be dihonest, are you? FOR SHAME!!!!
I can even beat that. Blame Bush!
Of course, you also have Chester, PA a few miles down river, to say nothing of Killadelphia (which at least has Center City, every nabe outside of CC being really bad) right across the river.
Camden has not even had liveable NEIGHBORHOODS since the mid-1960s. It has only gotten worse over the decades.
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Read "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" and "The Bell Curve" and you may change what you think. It's interesting that you phrase this "I prefer to think..." As good Americans we are brought up in a culture that praises achievement and promotes the idea of essential equality. I have never had people get so made at me in discussion as when I suggest that there may be a large genetic component to some problems. They strongly "prefer" not to think that. To the point of anger for pointing out that their preference is subverting their ability to think logically.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I'm pretty sure that anyone who argues, in the face of a large body of evidence, that the black underclass and blacks in Africa's problems are all 100% nuture and 0% nature is simply repeating a religious belief. (ie: all men are created equal).
Black underclass in America: illegitimacy, violence, drug addiction, despair, blaming of all problems on others.
White underclass in Britain: illegitimacy, violence, drug addiction, despair, blaming of all problems on others.
Obviously the problem is genetic.
I’m not adamant that the problem cannot involve genetics. As actual evidence is found proving a large genetic component, I’ll be willing to accept it. It’s just that the genetics that might be involved in such complex behaviors are far beyond our present ability to underestand, being far more complex than even the determination of a genetic component to the inheritance of raw intelligence.
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