Snitch Culture and People

So I've been reading about the 4 (actually 5) killings in Oakland. Wow. It seems the community there has a major problem with their police department, feeling they're abusive, racist, and dangerous. I'm sure the police feel the same way about the population they're supposed to be 'serving and protecting'.

I've lived in places ill-served by police, and generally the cops weren't necessarily all that bad, mostly just incompetent and uncaring. It used to drive me insane to call the police and have an officer come out, make biased statements about the neighborhood I lived in, and then point-blank refuse to pursue information I'd give them. I had cops tell me things like, "What do you want? You live here", and "I'm not doing anything about your complaint". It led to my simply losing sight of the fact that police existed at all, and for years after moving to more civilized places I had a terrible time getting used to the idea you could call the police and they'd actually do something! Wild! Far out! Imagine!

Anyway, people who live in bad neighborhoods (note I did not say poor neighborhoods, I said bad neighborhoods) tend to have their own culture and morals that don't match very well with general ideas of a more civilized society. Where I live now I meet people who I swear don't know street drugs are illegal. They act like they aren't, or as if they shouldn't be, therefore when they're 'hassled by the cops' they're outraged.

I meet a lot of young people who have been born into criminality and have no idea what a straight life is. They have no concepts of cooperation, no social mores, no idea of any greater societal obligations than a clannish dedication to their immediate circle of relatives and homies. In the case in Oakland, it surprises me not at all that neighbors and relatives knew the shooter was hiding in that apartment and chose to say nothing.

Where I live now the police largely can't get convictions for killings, some of which are now 5 or more years back, because people who have personal knowledge of the killer's role won't say anything. Usually, the police here wait for the people known to have killed others to make other moves, then convict them for those things, calling it 'close enough'. Why? No-one will talk about crime in their community. Why not? Well, mostly it implicates all their friends and relatives, and if people started actually reporting all the crime, there'd be nobody left.

Everyone's culpable, from the elderly grandparents taking money from their grandkids to store 'packages', to the little kids trained to report police presence on the street. It's multi-generational, family-based crime. Everyone is involved. Everyone.

My biggest problem with what I do for a living is unbelievably horrible behavior. Unfathomable rottenness. And honestly, I cannot for the life of me truly understand it. How do these people get this way? And the answer is, multiple generations of badness. The kids are bad because the parents are bad, and the parents are bad because their parents were bad. Generation after generation of rotten choices, bad behavior, and slack ignorance. Generations of teenaged, unattached mothers. Generations of absent, dimwitted 'fathers'. Generations of brain-dead parents who spend all their time swapping partners so the kids never have anything resembling an authority figure, ever, and don't know what family stability is.

I realized how deep the practice was when I listened to a pregnant 15-year-old girl discuss her upcoming birth, and without an iota of shame or irony described her plans. She was going to live with her mother, who would supply free child care, go to school until she could drop out, and then study at home for her GED, because she didn't like the way teachers 'be all up on her'. After this she wanted to, and I'm not making this up, become an RN because 'they make a lot of money'. When another girl asked her about the father, she announced, and again without malice or any discernable sense of emotion, that she didn't care for the guy, and had never liked him, but had had sex with him out of boredom. As far as the biological father's role in any of this, she stated she'd just sue him for child support and use it as her income while staying at her mom's for free, so she could shop and 'party'. When asked what she would do if he didn't pay her, she said, "He better pay me, or the state be puttin' him in jail". This plan was matter-of-factly laid out as if it were a trip to the mall. In none of this display was there any indication of any sense of responsibility, maturity, or dedication. This young woman simply did whatever she felt like, without any concept of consequences, and anything bad happening to her had nothing at all to do with any action of her own. Not only did she not have any idea that what she herself was doing might not be the world's best plan, she seemed to have little or no sense of herself as a person. She was impulsive, aimless, and ultimately passive, treating the world as some sort of smorgasbord of small paths, which she might or might not take depending on how she felt at the time.

And they are all over the place, these people. You can bet this girl's mother had the same kind of life. And we're going to have these folks be responsible citizens.