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 ...
I guess Camden has changed some in the last ~50 years....
It brings to mind the law of Natural Selection.
I could show you areas around Pittsburgh that could be a poster child for urban blight.
There is a town called Braddock that looks like it could be a stand in for Stalingrad after the Germans surrendered.
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