I think with the promotion of the snitch programs, and I just noticed some poster for a Vin Diesel movie called "snitch", that it is going to be an issue brought to the front of a lot of things and we need to come up with some ways to deal with it.

I was thinking of an awareness campaign over how the system works, how snitches get away with a lot of crimes and are often a bigger threat to society than the people they are snitching on, but that only addresses part of the issue, the criminal informant, and does not do enough to address the "solid concerned citizen" who is in reality just an unconvicted felon looking to play cash and prizes with whoever he can sell false information to. Those stories usually being right around 20% true, 80% embellishment and exaggeration in order to alarm the officials enough to raise the compensation levels for the "cooperation" of the "good citizen", maybe put in a word with the clinic to raise their pain med allocation and overlook some pending traffic citations too...Our problem is that with changes in the laws, the "20% true" part of an informant's story can still be enough to convict someone.

We have a huge snitch culture in this country right now, everything from junior G-man syndrome to drug addicts who figured out they can snitch people to jail and then go rob their houses. We have "swatting" in inner cities where people make false 911 calls just to get a SWAT team to raid a rivals house. Heck, jealous teenagers do it to each other on a regular basis in some cities.

I even read a book about the John Muhamad and the "DC sniper killings" where there was such a clamor of false leads being called in to the "fusion center" that they had set up it totally clogged the investigation and even seriously hampered any negotiations with the killers, while alienating a lot of the local population. As soon as word got out that an AR was being used in the killings, the call centers were jammed up with phone calls of stories (often greatly embellished) of how someone "just knew" who the shooter was, because they decided that someone they knew was a wierdo and owned at least one AR.

There was such a flood of calls on that you saw the investigation continue for years after the original case was officially closed. That's because in part, the police were given so much information on so many people that alleged so many crimes they felt obligated to follow up on it. Something about the cash rewards and "clean hands revenge" against individuals known to own the "wrong kinds of guns" has me thinking that was the primary motivation for most of those reports though.