THE PROBLEMS BEHIND THE CULTURE OF 'STOP SNITCHING"

Can snitching be ethical? The question has troubled me ever since I
was a little-bitty boy. I ratted out my neighborhood friend Andrew. He
had brazenly filched a couple of cookies out of his nice mother's
cookie jar after she had told us not to. When I snitched, Drew was
ticked off at me. But his mom let him off the hook. She even gave each
of us a cookie. Years later, sadly, Andrew would go to prison on much
more serious charges. I would pursue a career in journalism. As the
twig is bent, so grows the tree.

My childhood friend came to mind when I heard about a Web site called
whosarat.com, which is devoted to snitching on snitchers. It posts
names, photos and court documents of witnesses who cooperate with the
government. The Internet, that great megaphone for the masses, now
enables tattletales, too.

Whosarat.com was launched by a guy named Sean Bucci in 2004,
apparently out of personal rage. He had been indicted in federal court
in Boston on marijuana charges based on information from an informant.
At first the site was free, but it caught on. Now it charges $7.99 for
a week of access or $89.99 for a life membership and a free "Stop
Snitching" T-shirt.

In case you haven't heard, "Stop Snitching" T-shirts, DVDs, rap videos
and Internet sites are a sign that the criminal underworld's values
have gone mainstream, transmitted like a lethal virus through the
culture and multi-billion-dollar commerce of hip-hop.

As the rap star Cameron "Cam'ron" Giles said in a recent CBS 60
Minutes interview, cooperation with police would violate his "code of
ethics" and damage his street credibility. "It would definitely hurt
my business," he said. As a result, neither he nor his entourage of
potential witnesses have cooperated with police investigating Giles'
shooting in Washington, D.C., in October 2005 by a presumed carjacker.

The whosarat.com site claims to have identified more than 4,000
informers and 400 undercover agents, many from documents obtained from
court files available on the Internet.

Of course, police and prosecutors would like to shut it down, but that
pesky First Amendment stands in the way. The Web site claims that it
does not condone violence against anyone. Yet its homepage prominently
displays mug shots and bios of its "rats of the week" in a way that
all but paints targets on their faces.

According to a recent article about the site by New York Times
reporter Adam Liptak, at least one witness in Philadelphia has been
relocated, and the FBI was asked to investigate after material from
the Web site was mailed to neighbors and posted on cars and utility
poles in his neighborhood.

The "Stop Snitching" culture is bad, but it has grown in reaction to
two other malignant problems. One is the false testimony offered up by
too many witnesses looking for lighter sentences and used too eagerly
by unquestioning prosecutors. The other is a persistent pattern of bad
relations between police and civilians in certain neighborhoods.

Arrests and prosecutions too often have been tainted by witnesses
lured or coerced into lying in return for lighter sentences.

As stated in "The Snitch System," a 2005 report by the Center on
Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law,
"snitch testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in
capital cases."

An American Bar Association report, "Achieving Justice:
Freeing the Innocent, Convicting the Guilty," last year
similarly recommended requiring corroboration of
jailhouse informant testimony with other evidence or
testimony to avoid wrongful convictions.

Even in the small-town neighborhood where I grew up, residents would
refuse to cooperate with police if they felt the police could not be
trusted. Urban crime declined sharply in the 1990s after cities and
towns got a lot smarter about "community policing" programs to improve
police-civilian cooperation.

What happens next at whosarat.com depends on how smart police, judges
and prosecutors are going to be about the risks it poses. The Web
site's operators could be charged with witness tampering or aiding and
abetting criminals, but it would be hard to make the charges stick.
The information on whosarat.com is drawn from court documents posted
elsewhere on the Internet. That helps other defendants and their
lawyers to receive a fair trial. Judges are better off deciding in
each case whether witnesses' identities can safely be posted anywhere
on the Internet or whether they should be sealed legally from public
access.

There may be hope for hip-hop, too. Giles issued a national apology
after saying in his 60 Minutes interview that he would not even snitch
on a serial killer next door. Even the world of gangster rap reeled at
that one.

Page is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist specializing in
urban issues. He is based in Washington, D.C. (cpage@tribune.com)