Should Snitching Be Encouraged?

Snitching, squealing, whistle-blowing no matter what you call it, can it be justified and how does it affect the individual? The answer is it depends! We are living in a time where governments and government departments are actively encouraging snitching as a way to enforce laws, but is this healthy, what are the costs, to government, to society and to the individual?

Before I begin, let me explain, this is a discussion on the impact of snitching and not the morality of it. Of course I believe, that as a thinking person, you should be able to decide when you think it appropriate to inform on someone that you believe is threatening the safety of another. But I also believe that many law enforcement agencies are using this as a low fruit picking scheme and it is harming society.

The above is an example of government departments encouraging, informing on an ex. Aside from its pure cynicism what else could be wrong about this? Well, let's think about the person that is informing for a second what are the mental aspects that they need to deal with to carry out this act without scarring?

Well, firstly they have to be either angry or vindictive or be absolutely convinced that they are doing this all for the right reasons. The chances are that at some point they will have to deal with feelings of guilt - even if they are justified there will be some sort of internal battle. That guilt can cause depression and isolation. It could also cause people to imagine that they are being talked about or judged even when that is not the case. The outcome of this can cause feelings of loneliness and isolation.

Secondly, that person is telling on someone that buys guns, chances are that, even if the ATF jails him, somewhere down the line he is going to go looking for whomever it was that reported him. Now fear becomes a factor of the snitches everyday life.

Lastly loss of community or family. In some communities there is a stigma attached to helping the authorities - especially if it is to jail one of their own! That can lead, at best, to being ostracized. This negative social impact can fracture communities further leading to guilt by the person that went to the police. Again fear and loneliness are the results of their betrayal coupled with guilt for having hurt their community.

This idea that snitching harms communities is not new and it was something that was highly criticised in the West when it came to Communism. Speak to people from former Communist countries and you will hear stories of fear based around snitching, unjustified arrests and punishment and a sense of a lack of trust within communities. People became divided and the state took advantage of that division pushing those divisions further until even children were denouncing their parents. Many of those who are from former communist block countries and now resident in the west say that what has happened with media censorship, one narrative and reporting your neighbours to the police during the recent pandemic is akin to their former lives and not why they took residency in the West.

One has only to look at the vast division among nations across the world to know that the idea of social shaming and snitching has not worked to the benefit of those nations that encouraged it.There is a general feeling that we are more divided than ever, there is a rise of both left and right wing extremism and our governments are playing to that. Again, going into the whys of this is not the message of this article, however, the impact of depression and a sense of unease among many nations today is a direct cause of this attack by governments on their own people and will have to be addressed further down the line if we are to once again function as healthy communities.

Further to this the trust that people have in the police is severely harmed by campaigns such as this. We all have a sense of what is right and wrong and even if we are law abiding, we do not like to see things done in our name that might be vindictive and nasty. Not to mention that vast number of hours that will be spent by police sorting through what is good and bad information. The long and short of this is that the ATF might get short term gains from this, but the long term negative impact should far outweigh the decision to run a campaign like the one above.

In short the perceived gains of snitch campaigns are far outweighed by the negative impact to individuals and communities to warrant them. It is this author's opinion that this shortcut to policing will ultimately do more harm than good and that individuals tempted to tell on their neighbours, take a breath and consider if there are better, healthier ways to approach the issue before they burn bridges that may be impossible to repair later.

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