St. Louis CofCC Blog

Baltimore Sun:

‘Stop Snitching 2′ video promoted online
Original video highlighted culture of witness intimidation in Baltimore

The star, pot-smoking street sage Skinny Suge, is locked up in Western Maryland. The cameo celebrity, NBA all-star Carmelo Anthony, still plays for the Denver Nuggets, having bounced back from the bad publicity. And the two city cops called out by name, William King and Antonio Murray, are in federal prison, probably for the rest of their lives.

Mr. Anthony “bounced back from bad publicity” because the racial caste system in modern day professional and high-level amateur athletics turns a blind eye to this kind of behavior on the part of non-whites. If (as an example) reigning NBA MVP Dirk Nowitski appeared in a neo-Nazi video, he wouldn’t be able to “bounce back,” he would be out of a job.

Three years after the underground, profanity-laced DVD Stop Snitching became a local political prop and a national emblem of Baltimore’s crime problems, the producer, Rodney Bethea, is ready to release a sequel.

Stop Snitching 2 went on sale this week. For $9.99, plus shipping and handling, buyers can “pre-order the DVD they don’t want you to see,” Bethea’s Urly Media Web site says.

In an interview, Bethea said his intent is not to intimidate but to educate.

“What I’m doing is exposing the social conditions,” he said. “There’s a lack of information, a lack of hope and a lack of jobs. They’re closing schools and building juvenile jails. I’ve documented that mentality. Through awareness, I hope to bring forth change.”

Police officials aren’t buying it.

“The small portion of the DVD we’ve seen so far makes it pretty clear that these are not people with the best interests of the community at heart,” Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon and the police department, said in an e-mailed statement.

The trailer, which runs one minute and 19 seconds, features a middle-schooler waving a handgun and then taking a drag from a joint, and Skinny Suge (filmed before he pleaded guilty in January to first-degree assault) cussing at the city prosecutor and a congressman.

There’s also a man firing a gun into the night sky, seemingly for no reason.

It’s probably against the law in the place where this video was recorded for children of middle-school age to posess firearms, and for anyone to discharge firearms wantonly. And it’s almost certainly the case that smoking weed is illegal.

I remember a novelty news story came out a few years ago where a woman who was a convicted felon posed nude with a real handgun in a holster which was attached to a waistband she was wearing. The point of the story was that she wasn’t allowed to posess a real gun, and the ATF slapped some cuffs on her and the Federal prosecutors used the porn as evidence.

The point is that even in the realm of “artistic expression,” you can’t do anything patently illegal. Yet, this producer had children possessing guns, smoking weed, and men firing guns in the air, all as a production value. I wonder where the U.S. Attorney’s office for wherever this Stop Snitching 2 DVD was filmed is on this matter. That is unless these images were simply recordings directly from the streets, and not a matter of rehersal.

Read the rest here.

See the YouTube “Stop Snitching 2″ Promo here.