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.
Scared Silent
A Reluctant NeighborhoodThis is the eighth article in a series examining the problem of witness intimidation in New Jersey.
Rosalynn Glasco, with a photograph of her son, Salahuddin Igwe, 16, who was shot dead in June. Ms. Glasco tried to find leads, but said she understood why no one would come forward.
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.
