Posted on 06/06/2006 10:19:19 AM PDT by SmithL
Pittsburg High School senior Axel Molina wants to be a police officer, but he still proudly wears a T-shirt to school with a message that has raised the hackles of law enforcement, educators and city officials across the country.
Its message? "Stop Snitchin'". His reason for wearing it? "It's cool."
With slogans such as "No Snitching" and "Snitches Get Stitches," the shirts have received national attention in recent months in the media, blogs and chat rooms, with some calling the street credo a burgeoning movement. Boston's mayor crusaded against the shirts, and a Massachusetts judge banned them from his courtroom, saying the message limits freedom of speech and intimidates witnesses. School officials there also banned the shirts. That could happen next year in Pittsburg.
But for students like Axel, 17, "Stop Snitching" is not just a code of the streets. It's a fashionable social statement: Doing the right thing means not ratting on friends or classmates, no matter what.
"Snitches get beat. They cause problems because they go around saying things that are not true," said Pittsburg High sophomore Anna Farias, 16. "What's the point of snitching? To get people in trouble."
Pittsburg High Principal Tim Galli intends to combat that mentality by keeping the T-shirt and others like it off campus. Pittsburg school board President Percy McGee said he would back any ban on a shirt or anything else that makes for a hostile school environment.
"It's not just about a cool shirt. It's because of the message on it and people buying into that message," Galli said. "If you're not going to be honest, you're making a moral compromise."
Although some say that the shirts are just a fad, the attitude is not. For school psychologists, therapists and legal scholars, the shirts also reflect society's moral ambivalence. When cultural icons such as rapper Busta Rhymes refuse to snitch to police about the shooting death of his bodyguard, or former Oakland A's star Jose Canseco gets labeled for talking about steroid use in pro baseball, such ambivalence is accentuated.
"Adolescents are confused anyway, but society as a whole is confused about what's right and what's wrong," said Julie Anderson, a Walnut Creek-based psychotherapist. "With the increase in cheating and decrease in mores, it may be a fashion statement, but it's also the idea that 'It's not wrong unless you get caught.'"
Some scholars and educators warn against banning the T-shirts without emphasizing the ethical reasons why. Frank Worrell, who directs the school psychology program at the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley, believes schools need to reframe the snitching issue by taking a cue from colleges with honor codes.
"Use that message -- 'Don't snitch' -- as an impetus for having the conversation of 'What does this mean? Are there circumstances where this doesn't hold?'" he said. "Schools should deal with this because these are the types of issues that adolescents are grappling with."
Park Middle School Principal Scott Bergerhouse acknowledged it can be a tough decision for students to snitch. Trustworthiness, honesty and responsibility are tenets of a character development program implemented this year at the Antioch school and others in San Ramon, Danville and elsewhere.
"Kids need to police their own school," Bergerhouse said. "If they see something wrong, they need to take responsibility. It's part of character development."
Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, said while the purported movement has emerged in several cities, he's skeptical of how seriously it's taken by young people.
"All kinds of people may wear shirts that don't translate into their behavior," he said. "The fad's going to go."
Rosenfeld said that the irresponsible use of criminal informant can be destructive to neighborhoods, but that modern police work would come to a standstill if they weren't used. But the fear of retaliation is real in some places where people of all ages want to report a crime, but can't.
"We hear it all the time," said Jeff Koutz, a journalism teacher at De Anza High in Richmond, who had his students write essays about snitching. "Parents are screaming out for people to speak. ... There's a crime culture out there that promotes that whole concept as an ideal. And kids buy in because they think it's cool. But for some it hasn't hit home."
Junior Brittany Young, 16, of San Pablo said she's seen boys wearing the shirt at her school. It's intimidating, but she's not afraid of being targeted for doing what she knows is right. But the shirts shouldn't be banned, either, she said.
"The way people express themselves is through their fashion. It's what they wear," she said.
Antonio Ennis, co-owner of hip-hop clothing company Antonio Ansaldi, which sold more than 20,000 of the shirts since the designer first marketed the T-shirt as a novelty item in 1999, has responded to the reaction. His company has designed a "Start Peace" shirt to replace the controversial attire, along with releasing a song by the same name and other promotions.
"I try to promote something more peaceful," Ennis said, adding that he's sold about 2,000 new shirts. "That's the quest I'm on now."
But just because Antonio Ansaldi stopped producing the shirts in December, it doesn't mean anything is different, Ennis said, as knockoffs abound.
"That slang word 'snitching' has been around for a long time," he said. "It's been in urban streets, suburban streets. It's slang from Mafia talk down to the streets."
Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the shirts raise two important questions -- to what extent have authority figures in the lives of young people been "policified" and how people in poor areas with high crime rates experience police. She said having criminal informants in certain neighborhoods has dissolved long-term trust.
"For youth, the best way to glamorize something is to ban it and take it away," she said. "They're growing, they're learning, they're experimenting. The less room we give them to do that legitimately, and the more we criminalize those experiments, the less room we've given them to grow and mature in the richest way."
Where's it going? Back when dinosaurs roamed, I wore t-shirts with sayings on them.
Shucks! I'm way behind. I thought kids were wearing school uniforms.
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