SCARED SILENT

So Many Crimes, and Reasons to Not Cooperate

CAMDEN, N.J. -- When her 16-year-old son was shot dead on a street
corner here in June, Rosalynn Glasco became the latest mother left to
search for justice in a world without witnesses -- where the stigma
of being seen as a snitch or the fear of retaliation prevents many
from testifying about even the worst crimes.

But Ms. Glasco held out some hope, all the same. Determined not to
let her son's killer go unpunished, she urged her daughter and other
relatives to work the grapevine in the neighborhood where he was
killed, Whitman Park, searching for evidence, and maybe somebody
willing to share it.

Discovering nothing, she pressed on.

Ms. Glasco's extended family put together fliers and started
assembling a Web site to publicize a reward. She gathered her life
savings and set the figure for information at $5,000. She delayed
posting it because Camden detectives asked her to wait, saying they
had promising leads in the investigation.

The leads fizzled; a trip to see the mayor produced more promises of
effort, but no arrests. The murder of Ms. Glasco's son, Salahuddin
Igwe -- shot at 5 a.m. as he walked home from a party -- remains unsolved.

Ms. Glasco is disappointed. She is also realistic. If the tables were
turned, she admits, and if another mother were at her doorstep asking
for information, she is not sure she would help, either.

"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.

Atmosphere of Distrust

It was here in Whitman Park, after all, that a once-lauded community
police officer was sentenced to prison last year for robbing drug
dealers. And it was here that Gov. Christie Whitman was photographed
frisking a young black man who had been falsely suspected of carrying
drugs, an image that surfaced publicly in 2000 and came to symbolize
New Jersey law enforcement's longstanding practice of racial profiling.

And that is not all. The neighborhood's grim economic and social
realities, which have convinced any number of young people here that
drug dealing is the best job available, leaves many law-abiding
residents with conflicting loyalties.

There are so many people in the neighborhood with friends or
relatives in the drug business that to help police arrest a dealer
may jeopardize a family's financial security.

It adds up, the police say, to an environment where they encounter
people who, however much they despise the gangs, are more comfortable
coexisting with the Bloods, Crips or Latin Kings than assisting the police.

"There's a lot of history and a lot of reasons for people to stay
quiet that are hard to understand unless you're from there," said
Capt. Al Handy of the Camden police. "We've been trying to work with
people and win back the trust. But it's a long, long process."

The social stigma against helping the police has become an
exasperating obstacle confronting officials as they try to combat
increased gang violence in urban communities. According to Deputy
Attorney General Hester Agudosi, who supervises New Jersey's 21
county prosecutor's offices, the number of witnesses who remain
silent because they fear for their safety is probably less than
one-tenth the number who refuse to talk because they fear the social
repercussions.

One small, glaring symptom of the dilemma is the "Stop Snitchin'"
movement, an underground effort, popularized in rap videos and with
T-shirts, urging criminals not to testify against other suspects in
exchange for more lenient sentences. But the sense of estrangement is
far broader, crossing generational lines and testing the consciences
of people whose only involvement with crime is as a victim or
potential witness.

"A lot of white Americans from suburban communities can't understand
why people wouldn't talk to law enforcement," said Charles Ogletree,
a Harvard law professor who is studying witness intimidation for the
National District Attorneys Association. "But in a lot of inner-city
communities, there is so much hostility to the police that many
people of color can't fathom why someone would even seriously
consider helping them."

In Whitman Park, a neighborhood of less than half a square mile that
is home to 6,000 people, young men in black hooded sweatshirts are a
fixture on street corners and front stoops, openly flagging down
drivers to offer cocaine. Of the 43 murders that the Camden police
have reported this year, seven have occurred there.

The reasons for not talking about those murders -- or other crimes --
can be varied.

"Let's say you make a police report and they run your name and find
out you have a warrant from five or six years ago you forgot about,"
said Verdell Peterson, 52. "In this neighborhood, $250 is a lot of
money, and if you don't have it to pay your bail, you're going to sit
in jail until someone else does."

'You Might Get Killed'

But many say that steering clear of the police is a matter of trust,
and survival.

Neil Reynolds, 18, said that his upbringing in Whitman Park taught
him that "the wrong friends will get you shot and cops will get you
shot or locked up."

"If you talk to the police, you might get killed," said Mr. Reynolds,
who has a record for narcotics sales but says he is now trying to
leave the drug business. But even those who aren't physically harmed,
he said, face repercussions. "No one wants anything to do with you,
because when they get in trouble, they think you'll tell on them, too."

At Community Baptist Church, where funeral services have been held
for a half-dozen of Whitman Park's murder victims in recent years,
the Rev. David King said an entire generation of Whitman Park
children were being raised to fear the police.

Working from a run-down building with oil poured on unused doorways
to prevent narcotics dealers from congregating, Mr. King runs
anti-gang and drug rehabilitation programs and urges church members
to keep an open mind about the police. But last month, when a police
officer who is well known and well liked at the church crashed his
car out front, Mr. King said he was dismayed to see neighborhood
children cheering.

"All they could see was his uniform," he said.

Police and prosecutors have tried various strategies to regain the
trust of Camden residents in recent years. The Shooting Response
Team, which quickly floods the scene of any gun crime with a crew of
city, county and state investigators, has been credited with an
improved response to gun crimes. Statistics indicate that the
department has tripled its success in solving shootings, to 42
percent in 2006 from 14 percent in 2003.

But efforts to strengthen the community policing efforts in the
neighborhood and start a neighborhood watch program were set back
late last year when the officer assigned to Whitman Park, Cpl.
Michael Hearne, was arrested on charges that he and an accomplice had
been robbing drug dealers at gunpoint.

Corporal Hearne pleaded guilty and is serving a seven-year prison term.

Even those residents who are willing to trust the police can be
dissuaded from reporting drug activity to the authorities because
narcotics have become such an integral part of Whitman Park's
economy. Steven Carmichael, a postal carrier who is acting president
of the United Neighbors of Whitman Park, said that in many instances
people are ambivalent because they want to drive off the drug
dealers, but are friends with their parents.

"Do you say something to the parent? But maybe the parents already
know and are afraid to put the kid out on the street where he might
get shot or killed," said Mr. Carmichael, whose cousin across town
was killed by rival drug dealers last year. "Or maybe the parents are
out of work and don't ask where he gets that money so long as it
helps them put food on the table. From the outside it seems black and
white, but out here, things get complicated."

Things certainly got complicated for Mr. Carmichael after his cousin's death.

"I couldn't go to the funeral because people know I try to help the
police," he said.

In November, when detectives were stymied in the case of 12-year-old
boy killed in a Camden housing project, investigators brought the
child's mother up from Florida to canvass the neighborhood in hopes
that a "mother to mother" conversation with people near the scene of
the shooting might encourage witnesses to come forward.

The case remains unsolved.

Little Help From the Top

Ms. Glasco had hoped to help her son Salahuddin, known as Sal, avoid
the temptations and perils of Camden, and so in 2005 she moved with
him to Lindenwold, a suburb. Although his father is in prison and his
sister has had brushes with the law, Sal was the child who everyone
had hoped might at least escape the city.

One of Sal's jobs was at the Boys and Girls Club of Cherry Hill, near
Whitman Park. He frequently spent the night at his sister's home, on
Thurman Street, and socialized with friends down the block.

One June night he never made it back to his sister's. Ms. Glasco
eventually found herself on the telephone with a detective, who, she
recalled, "told me that he was sorry to inform me that my son had been killed."

From the outset of the investigation, detectives warned the family
that witnesses would be difficult to come by. But Ms. Glasco was
adamant that she was "not going to let this one go."

So she went looking for witnesses.

"I wanted to let them know this was about a mother and her son," she
said. "And maybe that would make them do the right thing."

She and her relatives would shake loose a nickname of a potential
suspect, but turn up little else. The police did little better.

A meeting in September with Mayor Gwendolyn A. Faison offered one
glimmer of hope when the mayor picked up the telephone a few minutes
into the conversation and got the deputy police commissioner on the
line. There was little follow-up, however, and Ms. Faison said she
wasn't surprised: Camden's government has been under state
supervision for nearly 20 years because of corruption, so the police
do not report to her.

"I can call, and I did," Mayor Faison said, "but I have no authority
over them."

The Camden police declined to discuss the case, but the Camden County
prosecutors say they are satisfied with the detectives' work and
optimistic that they're moving toward an arrest.

Since her son's death, Ms. Glasco said, she is often not certain
where to focus her anger. She is infuriated with the killer and
frustrated with the police. She is anguished by the thought that
someone knows who is responsible, but is too scared or cynical to
come forward. And she is honest enough to understand why they might not.

Still, she pleads.

"People have to put themselves in my shoes," she said. "I'm a mother
with a dead kid. And the person who did it is out there, smiling,
thinking that they got it made."