Police need to start snitching

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Teen found unresponsive in S.C. prison cell

Last month, seven men were killed during a riot in a South Carolina prison. Now, family members are again seeking answers in the death of an inmate in that state. A teenager who had been housed at the Kirkland Correctional Institution was found unresponsive in his cell last week. Within two hours he was dead at a Columbia, S.C. hospital.

Jamarcus Hykeem Dawkins' death was likely a suicide, according to the Richland County coroner. But the incident is still being investigated.

Through tears, Dawkins' mother says she was notified that her son had died less than two weeks after a phone call she had gotten from her child. Dawkins was slated to be released next month.

What will bring justice after cops kill? Police need to start snitching

Ibram X. Kendi asks an important question about police behavior after the Stephon Clark shooting in his piece "It's time for police to start snitching" published in The Atlantic this week. In the moments immediately after cops unloaded 20 bullets, killing the young black man in his grandmother's back yard, other cops showed up on the scene. And they, along with the shooters, muted their body cameras. "Was justice muted," Kendi asks "in those critical moments after the shooting?" What, he also wonders, didn't cops want included in the investigation?

Snitching is considered taboo in some communities, but the cop community shouldn't be one of them.

"Americans have talked constantly about a no-snitch black culture hampering police investigations, leaving violent criminals on the streets," Kendi explains. "But what about the no-snitch police culture that has hampered investigations into officer misconduct, leaving violent criminals on the streets?"

White people keep unnecessarily calling the cops. 'Something has got to change'

The first incident to get nationwide attention happened at a Philadelphia Starbucks. Two black men were escorted out of the restaurant by cops last month because a barista called 911 after the men used the bathroom without ordering food. Since, at least five similar incidents have gotten nationwide attention. Whites have called the cops on blacks for the most benign of legal activities — sleeping in the common area of a dorm room; golfing slowly; shopping; being a real estate investor who inspects homes.

Implicit biases seem to be prompting people to pick up the phone. According to a study published last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, black men were perceived as larger and more threatening than white men — even when study participants looked at photos of black and white men who were the same size.

So what can prompt people to stop picking up the phone?

"Accountability requires examining not just how police wield the powers assigned them by a badge," explained Brandon E. Patterson in Mother Jones, "but how whites wield the racial privilege they enjoy from birth."

For more on policing nationwide, visit policing.usatoday.com.

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