Snitch

(re Snitch)thorough article, good witting style. I was an SF cop many years ago and am also familiar with this case. I am afraid, however, that the article will deter more people from cooperating and give an already jaded police force and public more reason to ignore or not get involved with what is happening to fellow human beings. It is funny that they wanted to send her to Sacramento. Things aren't a whole lot better there and she cetainly wouldn't be any safer from gang activity. Over the years my heart has resoftened from my own jaded period and I often reflect, as others should, on what I recently read and have tried to make a part of my permanent ethical program, and that is that when we regard any other human being, we must view, act and react toward them as the imortals that they are. Tigaboo is still concious somewhere totally clear on all the opportunities he had to avoid his untimely ending and it would do Junk and many others well to consider life outside the projects box. It should also be quite clear that projects were a bad idea for everyone and should have come down long ago just like the Berlin wall and for pretty much the same reason.

Great story, but I have to ask the author one question? How come you made the cops and the D.A look so bad? They were just doing their jobs and SUCCEEDED in putting a thug away. Yet you made it sound like law enforcement was bullying her around. My salute to the cops for not letting her go back to the projects. She would surely be dead now.

This was a great article, very well written, colorful "novel-like" writing style gave vivid descriptions of real life events that made me feel like I was walking along in the events as they unfolded - can't say enough about it. This is my first experience with the SF weekly, I was searching for Sophie Maxwell on Google to follow up on a Prop F piece on KPFA radio and found this site - I read a few articles here and am very impressed with the choice of stories, the writing, depth of information, and point of view of the authors - compared to the watered down info-tainment homogeny you get in the mainstream press this is like a steak dinner in a world of greasy left overs. Nice to read news that matters, engages the brain and the heart, and isn't a piece of soap opera rehash. My only criticism is that your writers use the word "shit" way too much - your vocabulary needs to be on par with the sophistication you show in your stories.In regard to the story, this illustrated grit on many levels - I can relate to the hardships expressed in the story. The most telling thing about the story was something not mentioned but very evident through the story - the problem isn't Deanna, the cops, her sons, Tigaboo, Pumpkin, of even Junk but the entire system. In a world where companies like Lennar stand to make millions "redeveloping" Hunter's Point and trillions are wasted on a mostly white military industrial complex prepearing to fight nobody poor people are left to rot and fester in pools of human carnage by the wealthiest people on the planet that don't want to be bothered by them. Incidents like this on evey level from Tigaboo to Junk to Deanna and her sons are the natural progression of people left to themsevles cut off from prosperity by those who view them as competition using their resources to shut them out rather than include them in. Trying to tackle this one crime at a time is useless, the entire situation is a crime and only crimnal activity can come of it - including the crime of keeping these people locked into this ghetto by systematic racism and politics that favor the wealthy rather than social justice.To the commenter who wants to have the shiney cops shown to be heros - shut up, you don't know anything about how cops treat people in the projects. You're "cops are heros" bull is just a myth that comes from being a white person who grew up in the suburbs, gain a perspective from people who live the reality you are commenting on before you go discounting people's reality. Police are people like anyone else, with as much good and bad so don't go putting people on a pedestal just to be a butt kisser. The author actually showed a balanced portrayal of the police doing both good and bad things, which is very accurate. It says a lot that your assessment of this balanced portrayal is that it makes the cops "look bad" - as if showing a non-TV cop show view of cops is somehow slighting them, shows where you get your ideas of cops from - turn off the boob tube and go to hunters point and hang out if you want an education. Otherwise know your opinons show your lack of real world experience.The other commenter's views weren't really clear, I understand your sentiments but you really didn't say anything specific. The people of the projects are our problem as well, they are not an alien race living in a distant vacuum - they are there because the rest of society doesn't care for them and dumps them there to fester. They are pushed out of good places to live and stripped of ways of supporting themselves by greedy people who use their resources to gobble up more land and resources for their own greedy schemes, many African American communities in the BAy Area were middle class after WW II but crooked development schemes and governmental closures of military bases without any follow up job training drove their kids into ghettos where liquor stores and lending schemes have driven the cycle of poverty. Many social programs simply enable people rather than help them, then high and mighty white people come in after the fact and blame the recepients of this treatment as being the cause of the problem. When you care about helping people as if they were your family members and not just some object of charity or scorn then you'll be part of the solution. Otherwise, you're part of the problem the system you feed into is the same one that creates the environment that breeds people like Junk and creates the situation the DA and the SF police can't solve one needle in the haystack at a time. If you support more law enforcement, more jails, more draconian laws you're part of the problem - the entire situation needs care and compassion, people shouldn't live like this and none of us should let that go on. If you aren't doing anything about that then you are part of the problem. Before you look down your long nose at people like Junk or even Deanna, your government is spending trillions of dollars borrowed from China making white men rich killing colored people for no reason other than control the part of the world they lived in and if you want to some how support that or not care about that and say you're better than someone who lives like an animal put there by the social rules we all feed into and kills someone who shared his cage with him, then you have a clue as to why the situation is as it is and rather than looking at others you can start with the mirror. These events are our problem not any one individual's problem, all the social injustices that we either feed or permit to happen culminate to create the environments these events take place in. If we say the solution is locking more people up, creating more of a police state, and just continueing our materialsitic ways while shoving all this human carange under the carpet then let me tell you that you are the reason it happens. These places and circumstances need to exist before someone like Junk can express his lost soul like he did in this case - and the careless attitude of "oh that's just those people over in that ghetto, who cares - where's my iPod, brand new laptop, top of the line car, etc wah wah wah I want it now, now, now!" creates these human dumping grounds. hen people demand so much material wealth, others have to get pushed out of the way to make room - this is what creates the projects and the cycles of violence in them. Put down your things and care like the people in these places like they were your family. Cain sarcastically answered God "Am I my brother's keeper?" when He asked where Abel was, rather than be repentant of his murder as God was giving him an opportunity to be Cain delve further into his hatred and jealousy that dominated his heart and led to his murder in the first place rather than shun it and reverse his spiritual course. Likewise, if you harden your heart and don't see the materialism that leads to the impoverishing of those among us to live like animals that kill one another while the rest of us live in privlege disconnected from it - you are blind to the fact that our artificial world of class and systems is nohting but a fraud. What we need to do is prioritize people rather than things and status, people living like this should be hurtful to those not living like this, enough that it makes us say no to big buying things, driving, and enslaving ourselves to corporate schemes until these places get what they need to lift themselves up to better living conditions.

I am afraid the article made the cops and the DA's office look bad because the state of both *is* really bad. This was a well written article, "Wire"-like in its realism, but with the slant (appropriately) specific to San Francisco. While we have good, well-meaning, non-corrupt officers on the force, they are terribly managed. It's a tragic human-resource waste that a basically good force has such incompetent administration and higher-ups. Fong is an embarrassment, and the worst example of well-intentioned but inept affirmative-action hiring. How insulting to hard-working Asian-American and female police officers to put this hapless politically motivated "two-fer" in place. In any other major American city, she would have been fired long ago. That does not happen in SF because our mayor does not make enforcing the law a priority. He shows up at murders, but does nothing to stave off the worst conviction rate for capital crimes in any CA city ... in fact, near the bottom for most of the country. There is nothing unique about our city's demographics from a crime perspective. Just a thoroughly incompetent police administration, no leadership at its top or in the mayoralty, and a DA's office that makes the other two look good by example. The lion's share of the blame for the burden that this woman endured rests at the feet of our thoroughly inept DA. I have personally seen her office throw out cases at *trial* where a victim was violently assaulted, witnesses (one, my employee) had shown to testify, the perp was arrested (and on parole violation), the jury was selected, and the case had no hobbling technicalities. The victim, released from the hospital, and the assembled witnesses looked on, mouths agape, as the ADA explained that they'd go after him "next time" when they'd have a better chance at putting him away longer. WTF? This is the San Francisco in which we live ... with a murder conviction rate in the teens. Other cities with professional forces have rates between 55% and 90%. All of the tragedies that this article details so vividly could be vastly ameliorated by a scintilla of competence at head offices of the mayor's, the DA's, and the SFPD's. This disaster is their fault, and ours for not holding them to account.