KCTV5'S NIGRELLI DISCUSSES KC'S 'NO SNITCH' ENVIRONMENT Craig Nigrelli, who joined KCTV5 News in July 2005 as a reporter and now anchors KCTV5 News at 4 p.m. weekdays, did an in-depth series of interviews with Broadcasting & Cable magazine about how the "Stop Snitching" campaign in Kansas City and how it puts a chokehold on criminal investigations.
Nigrelli was quoted extensively about an incident outside a Knights of Columbus Hall where one of the victims was Nathan Bouie. "His (Bouie's) father actually held a rally demanding that somebody break the silence and say what they saw," says Nigrelli. " Despite more than one hundred people showing up for that gathering...still no hot leads or tips.
"I checked on that case day-after-day, week-after-week and got the same answers from investigators, "Nope, nothing to report, no one is talking."
Inner-city�s �Stop Snitching� campaign makes crime reporting more difficult�and more dangerous
By Michael Malone
Broadcasting & Cable, 5/26/2008
With 15 years in investigative reporting, from the bloody crack battles of Buffalo to a particularly murderous stretch in Minneapolis, KCTV Kansas City anchor/reporter Craig Nigrelli has developed a fair amount of street savvy when it comes to ferreting out a violent-crime story. But nothing in his bag of tricks could elicit eyewitness information following a deadly melee outside a Knights of Columbus hall in July 2006.
Two college students were killed and 10 more wounded as some 60 shots were fired in a brawl outside the hall. A few hundred people were at the event, yet when police and reporters began canvassing for information, no one seemed to have seen a thing.
 Nigrelli says the code of silence surrounding violent crime, the product of a grass-roots campaign called �Stop Snitching,� has a chokehold on Kansas City. At various times while he�s been interviewing witnesses, someone will walk by, repeatedly muttering �click-clock, click-clock��simulating the sound of a gun cocking and firing. As one might expect, the witnesses promptly clam up.
So goes investigative reporting in Kansas City and several other markets in America, as the Stop Snitching movement gains momentum and leaves residents scared to death of anyone with a badge�or a microphone or notepad.
�To this day, the question remains: How could two people get gunned down in front of so many people, and two years later, no one�s been charged?� Nigrelli wonders. �The answer is, no one will talk. �No Snitch� is loud and powerful here.�
Investigative reporters in all corners of the country are increasingly encountering the Stop Snitching campaign�spread through word of mouth, DVDs and T-shirts�that makes their jobs that much more difficult. And as digital media means that testimony on the evening news can exist on the Web forever�and be distributed virally to an array of devices�many believe it won�t be getting easier to produce eyewitnesses.
WCAU Philadelphia investigative reporter Harry Hairston knows about such hostility firsthand. While reporting a story a few years ago about a white man who�d moved to a mostly black neighborhood in Chester, Pa., and was being harassed by neighbors who did not want him there, Hairston returned to the station van after doing his reporting to the jarring sight of a cinderblock that had been thrown through his windshield.
�Their message was, leave us alone,� he says. �They did not want the media reporting on what was going on.�
Whether it�s called Stop Snitching, Don�t Snitch or Snitches Get Ditches, the code of silence centering on criminal activity goes back several decades, its roots in the old Mafia code of Omert�.
When the organized crime families refused to take part in the narcotics trade, the street gangs stepped in, and used similar tactics of intimidating witnesses and making examples of so-called �rats.�
LINK TO REST OF STORY: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6563963
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