Mr. Cooper:

Shame on you and your producers, Mr. Court and Mr. Sharman, for the shoddy piece of journalism aired on Sunday, April 22, 2007. After viewing your 13 minute segment titled Stop Snitchin’, I am unsure of the intended message. Mr. Cooper should I believe that hip-hop has created this ‘organic’ campaign to champion the existence of a violent underclass within the low-income communities of predominantly African-American minorities? Or perhaps, I should have left away from your segment thinking that if only hip-hop artist started rapping the virtues of cooperation with local police forces then crime as we know it in low-income communities would end or at the very least lift the clearance rate to the paltry 60 percent national average quoted in your piece. Maybe your piece was tempting to convey how record companies’ are in collusion to profit from violence in low-income communities.

I feel Mr. Cooper your segment was one of comparing oranges to tangerines – there is a common culprit between the silence of a community in investigative efforts and artists championing of this silence but that culprit isn’t hip-hop. Hip-hop artists have preached for years, the ethos of ‘snitches get stitches’ or commonly characterized as a “Stop Snitchin’” campaign. Because hip-hop is a culture, it has a well understood code of ethics among its members which is based in part on its interaction with other cultures. The no talking to the police policy for hip-hop artist is bore out of the reality that the police culture does not have the hip-hop culture’s best interest at heart – in essence the police are not concerned with protecting the community. In New York City, the police department has a task force (aka the hip-hop police) that treats hip-hop artists as if they are members of an organized criminal entity with constant surveillance of artists. Given the level of suspicion given to hip-hop artist, both local and out of state artists, by police even when they are well established artists operating legal business within the city limits it is not odd that Cameron Giles (aka Cam’ron aka Killa Cam), Jacyeon Taylor (aka The Game aka Chuck Taylor), or Trevor Smith (aka Busta Rhymes aka Bus-A-Bus) would hold firm to the concept of not talking to police – no matter what.

Within the low-income communities which must deal with not only suffering at the hands of criminals but also must bare the burden of living within the same community with criminals, the credo of “Stop Snitchin” speaks volumes again to the police department’s ineffectiveness to identify the real threat and to control crime. What would have been nicer than having someone mention 75 percent into the piece about clearance rates in general would have been someone speaking to clearance rates within the African-American low-income community when eyewitnesses step forward and testify in cases or clearance rates within other ethnic specific communities’ (ie Asian-American) with the similar belief in not talking to the police when dealing with select aspects of violent crime. I suspect if you must snitch on your neighbor’s son about a crime and then have to go and live next door to the perpetrator until the trial, odds are you are less inclined to get involved in the first place and are more inclined to work harder to move – similar to Mr. Giles (aka Cam’ron) comment about living next door to a mass murder. Of course this does not bode well for the children of the community, which you attempted to show how they are indoctrinated by way of hip-hop, at an early age too not talk to the police regarding crimes. Again what would have been more revealing then having children parrot what the previous ten minutes of the piece established would have been delving into how they understand their relationship to police and more importantly community policing. Given that all of these children are from NYC you had a recent example of policing not working in the community that they are aware of (the Sean Bell shooting incident) and countless other similar incidents that have happened within their community that would have revealed how these police images work within the framework of ‘Officer Friendly’ community policing for them. I am betting dialog would have revealed parents, community policing or community organizations do not have a plausible narrative for this, but hip-hop does have one. You can’t fault hip-hop for having a narrative that fits, however that means your story should have been barking up a different tree other then hip-hop’s or your story should have focused on how that narrative is drawn within hip-hop.

Mr. Cooper I expect better journalism from you, and more importantly from the brand that is 60 Minutes, and this was simply a shoddily researched effort by you and your producers and mirrored MTV News more then the venerable source that is the home of Mike Wallace and some of the best investigative journalists. Mr. Cooper in the future, try actually asking questions that will lead you closer to the core of an issue instead of taking the target du jour (hip-hop) and trying to build around it. This approach has not served you, and left you committing some bad journalism. For instance you mention Kimberly Jones (aka Lil Kim) and her perjury conviction, but you didn’t mention that fellow rappers from her entourage actually ‘snitched’ on her leading to the trial and her successful conviction. Of course that wouldn’t have worked well with the overall theme of hip-hop artist promoting a hardline ‘stop snitchin’ campaign, also I was confused why Ms. Jones was mentioned at all since she was convicted on perjury which isn’t a violent crime like the ones insinuated throughout your story. Also you alluded to the murders of Tupac Shakur (aka Tupac) and Christopher Wallace (Biggie Smalls aka Notorious B.I.G.) as examples of ‘stop snitchin’ at work despite the cooperation of many within the hip-hop community with various police forces in charge of investigating the murders and those same police forces ineptness with the investigation. While I haven’t gone to a tony school like Dalton or Yale, I know enough about journalism to know your case examples should be valid and your research thoroughly vetted.

Mr. Anderson at the very least you should apologize to the African-American community for using them for such an exploitative story as the one you produced. Your story committed the same fallacy that many local police departments do, the African-American low-income community is judged guilty first and all investigations start at this point for them. This leaves African-Americans working twice as hard to prove the base level of innocence that most Americans can assumed during an investigation. Your story assumed that hip-hop with its bluster has to be guilty for the lack of cooperation between police and the community, despite your story having poor case examples for this you produced a story just the same. No meaningful dialog can come out of a poorly built piece of journalism such as the Stop Snitchin piece, and as an African-American and as someone planted firmly within hip-hop culture, I am deeply offended by this ‘brand’ of journalism you tried pass off on April 22, 2007.