Boston Magazine has an interesting article on the problem of witness intimidation in Boston and its impact on the criminal justice system. It should be noted that pistol permits are almost impossible to obtain for most Boston residents. Jenry Gonzalez was shot in a crowded park while trying out for Pop Warner football. His unsolved shooting shows how reversing Boston's climate of witness fear will take a lot more than pulling "Stop Snitchin'" T-shirts off the shelves.
Rich
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2006/02/26/silence/?page=full
Silence
By Neil Swidey | February 26, 2006
IN THE EARLY MORNING OF AUGUST 2, 2004, THE 11-YEAR-OLD boy was emerging after a horrendous night of heart and lung surgery. With tubes in his mouth and down his throat, Jenry Gonzalez was in no position to talk. So his mother, standing beside his hospital bed, handed him a pad. "Did I get shot?" he wrote down.Article Tools
By then, he was about the only one in Boston who didn't know the answer.
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The Boston Police Department has a startlingly low rate of solving homicides. Last year, it made an arrest or identified a suspect in just 29 percent of murder cases. In nonfatal shootings, the rate was much worse: about 4 percent. That's more than two out of every three murders and more than nine out of every ten shootings going unsolved. Still, Jenry's case had everything going for it. No 2 a.m. alleyway gun battle between feuding gang members, it played out in a sunlit neighborhood park, with a swarm of police responding to the scene in minutes. And there were more than 150 potential witnesses, some of whom couldn't help but have seen what happened. How could this case not be solved?
The day after, the mayor and the police commissioner ventured to a nearby community center to reassure residents and promise justice. "We're not going to let any hoodlums take over our city," Tom Menino said.
A year and a half later, justice has yet to be served. Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley says the investigation into Jenry's shooting is an example of what happens when witnesses live in fear of coming forward, and he cited it in his successful campaign to get the Legislature to fund a witness protection program.
But there's little to suggest that any of the current initiatives generating headlines will confront core problems, like the gulf of distrust between the residents of high-crime neighborhoods and law enforcement or the common assessment that the thugs in their midst, and not the police, control their streets. It's hard to see how that will be substantially changed by the witness protection program, a sensible but modest effort with limited application. Or by the well-meaning talk from the pulpits of Boston's black churches, exhorting witnesses to step up and do the right thing. Or by Menino's jihad against those "Stop Snitchin'" T-shirts, which may have succeeded in making the shirts more sought after.
If the failure of witnesses to cooperate helped doom the investigation into Jenry's shooting, the failure of law enforcement in a seemingly slam-dunk case like this one may well discourage witnesses to future crimes from coming forward.
"Right now, witnesses are making a very rational decision not to cooperate," says David Kennedy, a criminologist who helped design the strategy behind the Boston Miracle and who now faults Boston officials for allowing it to die amid egos and inattention. "Until they can make a rational decision in the other direction, it's not going to work."
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"If you have a shooting where your victim is on board 100 percent, it's shocking," he says. If a victim is a gang member, he may choose not to cooperate because he has street justice in mind. But other victims don't cooperate for fear it might leave them further exposed. As police worked this case hard, Flashner says, they could tell that fear of reprisal was keeping witnesses from saying what they knew.
There was no indication of overt intimidation. Boston isn't Baltimore, where a 17-year-old was kidnapped and shot dead in 2003 after his name was announced as a witness in court. Still, intimidation is real here. When prosecuting a case against the shooter of a cabdriver in Dorchester, Flashner saw a key witness cooperate during three grand jury appearances. But after the defendant called the witness repeatedly from jail, the cooperation ended. The witness ultimately served a year in jail rather than testify at the trial, and the state's highest court ruled that his earlier testimony could be used instead.
More common, though, is the kind of implied intimidation that hovered over the investigation into Jenry's shooting and always seems to be coursing through Boston's highcrime neighborhoods.
Flashner knows this kind of intimidation makes his job to put the bad guys away infinitely harder. But he understands it. "I work in a courtroom where the judge enforces the rules," he says. "The court officers are there. The police are there. But at 2 in the morning on a dark street, it's not that way. It's a hard choice to come forward. It's courageous."
On August 25, three weeks after Jenry was shot, Keeler made an arrest. The alleged shooter's name was Kirk P. Gordon, a 23-year-old from Mattapan who was out on $5,000 bail, awaiting trial on charges of stabbing five men two years earlier. At a press conference, officials praised the cooperation of witnesses. What they didn't say was that the arrest had been based largely, if not entirely, on the statements of one man. Flashner will not comment on the specifics of the witness, except to say he had some "tangential involvement" and knowledge of a possible motive. Two law enforcement sources now confirm that the man had told police he had driven Gordon to and from the park.
Gordon was held on $750,000 bail.
"We were all relieved," says Lazar Franklin, the organizer of the South End Pop Warner football team. But, he adds, "I think they made an arrest to pacify people."
There was some talk in the neighborhood that police may have had the wrong man. No doubt Gordon had a rough record. But he did not appear to be part of the Lenox Street-1850 gang war that some people assumed was behind the shooting.
Flashner says there was probable cause for police to arrest Gordon. But he also knew that to prosecute Gordon, he would need more evidence. As he presented the case against him toa grand jury, police went back to the pool of witnesses and succeeded in persuading one man - whose son had been trying out for the team - to come forward. On October 21, that witness sat behind a two-way mirror in a lineup room at police headquarters as Gordon and other men were brought in, one by one. The witness was not able to identify the suspect. Flashner says he saw no indication that the witness was being anything other than truthful.
On November 16, Flashner drove to Roxbury, sat down at the kitchen table in Jenry's house, and apologetically told his mother there wasn't enough evidence to go forward with the case against Gordon. He would be released.
Says Flashner, "There's no doubt in my mind that plenty of people in that park saw and knew what happened."
ON A BLUSTERY MORNING TWO MONTHS ago, community activists and clergy members crowded into the basement of Roxbury's Charles Street AME Church for a meeting of the Boston TenPoint Coalition, the black ministerial alliance so crucial to the Boston Miracle. An assistant district attorney named Kevin Hayden was urging the crowd to lobby lawmakers for the passage of a state witness protection program. This shouldn't be confused with the costly federal program made famous by Hollywood for moving people with Bronx accents into Indiana cul-de-sacs. The modest Massachusetts initiative would create a $750,000 pool that district attorneys across the state could dip into to cover overtime for targeted police escorts, to put up witnesses in a hotel during a trial, or to move them to a new apartment, most likely in the same city.
After Hayden finished his pitch, Lisa Fliegel, who runs the Arts Incentives Program for traumatized girls, raised her hand. She relayed the experience of a 17-year-old client, who had recently been called to testify in a gang-related trial. Instead of being given a witness room, the girl was made to wait right outside the courtroom, as associates of the accused walked by her. "If you have a key witness in a homicide trial exposed to the families and other gang members," Fliegel said, "you're not going to have people wanting to testify."
Another hand went up. "What is really happening to protect people who put themselves on the line?" asked Laurita Crawlle, a Dorchester mother of three. "I've personally been in a situation where I complained about something going on, and my complaint was sent to their house." Many in the crowd nodded or said, "That's right!" As for coming forward as a witness, Crawlle said, "I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it myself, quite frankly. So convince me that I'm protected."
Few people have worked harder for the passage of the witness bill than Hayden's boss, Dan Conley. And there's little doubt that the witness program will be a valuable addition. Still, Conley acknowledges that, even with extra protection, he is asking witnesses to make a "terrible" decision: "Do I put myself and my family at risk by doing the right thing and cooperating with police? Or do I let violent crime run amok in my neighborhood?" Yet without witness involvement, he says, law enforcement simply can't do its job.
But here comes the chicken-and-egg question. If residents of high-crime neighborhoods had confidence in law enforcement's ability to solve more cases and prosecute more killers, wouldn't they be more inclined to come forward? Of Boston's 75 homicides last year -- a 10-year high -- police made an arrest, issued an arrest warrant, or identified a suspect in just 22 cases, or 29 percent -- the lowest rate in more than a decade. The national average for police departments is 62 percent, according to the FBI. In addition, Boston Police provided data for 266 of last year's 290 nonfatal shootings; of those, a suspect was arrested or identified in just 10 cases, or 4 percent.
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In lower-crime communities, witnesses are more willing to come forward, in part because they have a higher level of confidence that the system will work for them. Even if it doesn't, these witnesses, who tend to be more affluent, usually have the resources to protect themselves, whether that's hiring top lawyers and private security or moving to a new city. But it's hard to see how residents of high-crime neighborhoods will be more willing to come forward until law enforcement can make a more credible claim to a positive outcome once they do. (Even those working-class people who aren't worried about retribution may keep quiet because they don't want to lose a day's pay to testify in court - or, more likely, several days' pay, given the judicial system's hopeless indifference to everyone else's time.)
For David Kennedy, the solution seems painfully obvious. In the mid-1990s, as a researcher at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Kennedy was part of the team that designed Operation Ceasefire. It was a coming-together of the many layers of local, state, and federal law enforcement, as well as clergy, community, and youth service operations. These agencies worked together to identify the most violent offenders and show them how a crime committed by one gang member would bring down the combined Ceasefire apparatus on the entire gang. There was credible follow-through behind the tough talk. And there were real resources devoted to getting at root causes, like the lack of jobs.
The approach, of course, was stunningly successful. After Ceasefire was implemented in 1996, Boston's homicide rate was cut in half - by two-thirds among people 24 and under. It may have been too successful, Kennedy says. Funding for services suddenly seemed more expendable. And as the Boston Miracle drew national media attention, many of the people behind it were soon called to the White House, Congress, and other cities to share their secrets. As some got more credit than others, he says, it strained the remarkable interagency cooperation and drained the Boston effort of its singular focus. "It wasn't a miracle," says Kennedy, who left Boston last year for New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It was work. As long as the work got done, the streets behaved."
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