Mayor Thomas Menino just turned the thousands-strong Boston Police force into the real-life version of many a dresser’s greatest fear: the fashion police.
Menino believes a new trendy T-shirt with the words “Stop Snitching” emblazoned across the chest inside a blood red stop sign incites people to obstruct justice and disobey the law. As part of a new initiative, he is moving to have the allegedly incendiary garment removed from the shelves in Boston.
Critics of the T-shirt — which is popular among youth, especially in the inner city — fear that the shirt will discourage people with knowledge about crimes to come forward to the police or to testify in court.
Last week, Menino announced plans to dispatch officials from the City Inspectional Services Division to force shop owners to stop selling the T-shirt as part of his vow to take a tougher stance on rising violent crime rates.
“We’re going into every retail store that sells them, and we’re going to take them off the shelves,” Menino told reporters, but did not indicate under what legal authority the ISD would confiscate the T-shirts. The mayor’s office did not return repeated calls for comment.
The T-shirts, made popular by rap artists who include Young Jeezy and Diplomat, started appearing in Boston last year and have recently spread to Baltimore and Pittsburgh, where it swayed the outcome of an October criminal trial. A witness that was called to testify against three men in a murder trial was ejected from an Allegheny courtroom because he was wearing a “Stop Snitching” T-shirt, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Without the vital witness testimony, prosecutors dropped the charges against the defendants.
Although Menino has not publicly addressed the issue since he first announced his plans, store owners have already reacted to the mayor’s plan.
Tello’s, located in Downtown Crossing, sold the “Stop Snitching” T-shirt for the past month until the store voluntarily pulled it off the sales floor after Menino’s announcement last week, according to a store spokesman.
“We do have a relationship with the city,” the spokesman said. “We’ve been here a long time, and we are a family operation, and because of that, we tried to eliminate things with guns. We don’t want to promote that sort of thing. This is another issue that we chose to abide by what the mayor has said.”
“Big Daddy” James Penn of Brockton, a longtime Boston street vendor, said he was concerned the mayor’s plan violates free speech, but he said the shirt sends the wrong message to the youth.
“People in the suburbs are not fully attuned to what’s going on in the inner city — the drugs and the shootings — because people are [covering up for] people and that violates your right,” Penn said. “Sometimes you have to speak up, and that’s how you get change.”
The American Civil Liberties Union immediately slammed Menino’s announcement, citing a range of constitutional rights violations, including the right to free speech. According to ACLU spokeswoman Carol Rose, the mayor has no right to send in the ISD to force people to stop selling the T-shirt, and she expressed concern that this could become a continuing trend.
“If this is the government’s response to violence — taking down T-shirts — what’s next? Banning baggy pants, backwards caps and rap music? The government certainly can’t tell people what they can or can’t wear.”
Rose said she believed that the courts are already properly equipped to avoid witness intimidation. Rose said the T-shirt controversy was a stunt pulled by the mayor’s office to divert for the focus away from the real causes of inner-city violence.
“The really sad thing is that it’s diverting our attention away from serious things to do to address violence,” Rose said. “We need to consider adding more police officers, creating after-school programs, create serious gun-control laws to really address the issues.”
Boston resident Ted Johnson said he thought the mayor was not taking enough responsibility for the city’s inability to keep crime rates down.
“I think [the city] uses it as an excuse because they aren’t doing their job,” Johnson said. “Just because people ‘stop snitching’ doesn’t mean they’re not killing. The city is using this to justify their lack of work — it’s their scapegoat.”
DFP Contributing Writer Lauren Head contributed to this report.
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