Snitches get stitches

The first rule I encountered during my research was the ‘no snitching’ policy, of which Yassine was a firm believer. The first time I met Yassine was at the weekly futsal activity at Het Gebouw, in late January 2019. He was quite an imposing figure, and he seemed to know everyone in the sports hall. It turned out that up until recently he had been a ‘talent’, meaning he had been one of the local adolescents that is recruited by Sport- en Jongerenwerk to assist the youth workers and act as a role- model for the rest. Despite no longer being a part of the organisation, he would still turn up to the futsal activity every now and then to check up on everyone and to have a chat with the youth workers. On this particular evening, there was an instance where Yassine had kicked a ball away, and the referee wanted to know who had done it. At that moment, one of the ‘Dutch’ interns at Sport- en Jongerenwerk indicated that Yassine was the culprit, to which Yassine said, “You see, it’s always the Hollanders who snitch!” This particular statement stuck with me, as I recalled an earlier conversation with the local police officer in which he bemoaned the fact that so few “allochthons” shared information with him or helped his colleagues in solving cases. In a general sense, ‘snitching’ means telling on someone, or giving information about them to a third party. From his experience, ‘Dutch’ boys were much more forthcoming and cooperative when they questioned at the police station, whereas ‘allochthons’ always made use of their right to remain silent. A few weeks after the futsal activity, I spoke to Yassine about whether he genuinely believed that Dutch people were more prone to snitching. He insisted that he had been joking, and that he did not mean anything by it. Yassine’s view was that ‘snitching’ was part of a global street culture, primarily of marginalised urban areas, and the peoples and cultures that you tend to encounter in those areas in the Netherlands right now have Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds.

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“In the Slaaghwijk it’s a matter of continuous denial, until the very end, and not naming

names. Not only in the Slaaghwijk though, I think it’s like that in every so-called disadvantaged area.” – Yassine

It struck me that Yassine’s ‘no snitching’ policy bore a resemblance to omertà – the code of silence employed by members of Italian and American mafia communities. Similarly to Yassine’s intepretation, omertà means more than simply not sharing information with the police or other authority figures; it places importance on minding your own business and avoiding involvement in other people’s disputes (Schneider & Schneider 2008: 365). Omertà has its roots in Sicily around the end of the nineteenth century, where the prevailing sentiment at the time was that the law offered no protection, not even to honest people (Blok 1974: 51). The relevance of the omertà comparison to Yassine’s view is not just a similar interpretation of a moral code, but also the existence of a personal framework for moral reasoning, rationality and ‘managing existence’ (see: Pardo 1996). Not snitching can be seen as the manifestation of some of Yassine’s personal virtues – honour and respectability. For Yassine, telling on someone or sharing information with the police would greatly impact someone’s reputation as an honourable and trustworthy individual. It is simply ‘not done’. For Yassine, working with the police is not the ‘right’ thing to do, as it greatly impacts his own respectability and social standing. Another aspect of Yassine’s ‘no snitching’ policy is non- interference. He viewed it as unethical to get involved in other people’s business, and would rather keep to himself. This means that if there is a dispute that Yassine has knowledge of, he feels the ‘right’ thing to do is to let those people in the dispute solve it among themselves.

There were other adolescents with similar moral dispositions to Yassine who ended up in rather complicated ethical conundrums. During my fieldwork in the Slaaghwijk, there was an incident where a wall had been tagged with graffiti and the police got involved. With the help of camera footage, they were able to figure out who had been in the area of the wall around the time it was tagged. However, the footage did not provide any recognisable suspects except for Adil (15), who could be seen interacting with the group suspected of tagging the wall immediately after the incident was thought to have taken place. Upon being questioned by the police, Adil denied all involvement and denied knowing the group of suspects, leaving the police empty-handed. Adil insisted that even if he had known them, he would not have told the police. It meant that Adil stood to lose quite a lot, at least in terms of a fine or a potential criminal record, if the police could prove his involvement. The police had questioned him on multiple occasions about the other suspects but Adil would always insist he had no knowledge of them or the incident. For Adil, whatever may or may not have happened was between him and the others, he did not see it as his responsibility to help the police prove anything, even if it would have proved his own innocence.

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