4

Recognize, Resist, Report

D.A.R.E. America and the Kid Police

In April 1990, a guidance counselor at a Searsport, Maine, elementary school summoned a fifth-grader to her office. The counselor asked the eleven-year-old, Crystal Grendell, whether her parents used drugs. After the counselor reassured her that “nothing would happen,” Crystal eventually admitted that her parents smoked pot on occasion. At school a few days later, Crystal was greeted by three D.A.R.E. police officers who interrogated her about her parents’ drug use. The officers threatened Crystal, saying that her parents would be arrested if she didn’t tell them everything she knew about her mother and father’s recreational drug habits. The officers then warned her against telling her parents about their encounter, claiming that “often parents beat their children after the children talk to police.”1 Scared, the eleven-year-old agreed to carry out a spy mission on her parents. The D.A.R.E. officers instructed Crystal to count her parents’ marijuana plants and provide details about their schedules and the layout of their home. When Crystal reported back to the cops, they informed her that her house would be raided and that she would not be able to stay there that night—again, because “in most cases like this, children are beaten by their parents.”2 After the police raided the house, finding a number of marijuana plants, Crystal’s parents were arrested and her mother was fired from her jobs as a teacher’s assistant and a bus driver. The D.A.R.E. officers had failed to make arrangements for where Crystal and her younger sister would stay while their parents were in police custody, and when the police couldn’t find any nearby family members they had to take the girls to the house of a distant relative. Feeling that the police and school officials had manipulated her, Crystal—who was once outgoing and gregarious—became socially withdrawn and suffered from psychological distress. Reflecting on how the incident had turned her life upside down, Crystal later told the Wall Street Journal: “I would never tell again. . . . Never. Never.”3

When a federal judge awarded Crystal a civil judgment against the D.A.R.E. officers, he issued a strong condemnation of how they had turned the fifth-grader into an informant against her own family: “This type of coercive extraction of indicting information from an eleven-year-old girl about her parents is reprehensible behavior unworthy of constitutional protection.”4 This reprehensible behavior, unfortunately, is all too characteristic of a program that has long been criticized for its tendency to use children to gather information about their families and communities. The only thing unique about this story is that the D.A.R.E. officers coerced the young girl in an especially callous way; indeed, most D.A.R.E. programs involve coloring books, stuffed animals, and special certificates rather than bullying and threats. Whether they use coercion or gentle persuasion, however, D.A.R.E. and similar youth programs have much to teach us about American spy/snitch culture. Indeed, while we tend to think about the neoliberal subject as a responsible adult, the D.A.R.E. phenomenon illustrates how programs of enterprising civic duty cultivate responsible child-subjects throughout their schooling years.

D.A.R.E. and similar youth/police collaboration efforts kill two birds with one stone: from the perspective of the police, the youth who participate in these programs are taught to identify with cops, thus readjusting their social values in accordance with the law-and-order objectives of police agencies. In addition, these programs teach children to scrutinize and regulate their parents’ and peers’ conduct. Youth/police collaboration, therefore, is often promoted as a solution to the youth problem.5 As Dick Hebdige notes, in the twentieth century—and especially since World War Two—we have repeatedly seen the emergence of marginalizing discourses that fret over the ungovernable and “illegible” nature of youth cultures.6 While authorities seek to break through this “illegibility” in diverse ways—including disciplinary surveillance, arrests and incarceration, and other harsh measures associated with law-and-order policing—one of the more liberal ways to address this problem is to recruit local actors who can provide the inside scoop on youth misbehavior. While these local actors might include parents, pastors, and community leaders, they also include youth themselves. Through youth/police collaboration efforts such as Junior Police programs and D.A.R.E. America (originally Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or simply D.A.R.E.), cops teach kids to keep an eye on their peers and to report any misdeeds to the authorities. In lieu of tackling structural social problems that alienate and disfranchise teens,7 the police and allied institutions have developed cultural technologies that train kids to keep an eye on their peers and parents.

While a number of scholars have looked at how Head Start programs, the Boy and Girl Scouts, and local recreational initiatives have influenced the behavior of teens, less attention has been paid to how the police have used youth/police collaboration programs to form and regulate young citizens.8 This chapter will give a broad historical analysis of how American youth have been policed through programs that, in essence, encourage kids to act like cops. An essential element of this has been the cultivation of civically engaged seeing/saying habits. The most basic goal of D.A.R.E. America, for example, is to teach kids to say the right thing: to just say no. In fact, the D.A.R.E. project is often characterized as a plan to teach children “The Three R’s”: recognize, resist, report. “Recognize,” of course, encourages a lateral surveillance sensibility, prompting kids to be vigilant against suspicious activity in their midst. “Resist,” on the other hand, is tied to a carefully cultivated form of speaking subjectivity: to just say no. And “report” provides a complementary communication imperative: once kids have seen unapproved behavior and, if asked to join in, have just said no, they are then compelled to inform the police about what they’ve seen. This is D.A.R.E.’s basic formula: to cultivate specific practices of seeing and saying that help authorities monitor, police, and engage a relatively hard-to-reach sector of the citizenry.

In this chapter I will illustrate how a series of social crises (idle working-class teens, wartime lack of parenting, and the drug war) have been addressed by youth/police collaboration. With the Children’s Aid Society, the Boy Police, the Juvenile Coppettes, the Youth and Police Initiative, D.A.R.E. America, and similar youth/police programs, the police apparatus has infiltrated youths’ social networks, effectively disrupting their traditional allegiances to friends, community, and family. While working-class kids in the early twentieth century were assailed by innumerable private and public welfare programs aimed at monitoring and governing their behavior, many of the youth engagement programs which were state-sponsored—particularly those organized by police agencies—strove to civilize youth by having them serve the state. Although these youth/police programs were only one element of a much larger apparatus of youth governance, they were unique in their emphasis on cultivating habits of seeing, saying, and patriotic duty. Yet important cultural forces have organized resistance to the spy/snitch culture promoted by the police and their allies—kids today are barraged by a police apparatus that urges them to “keep talking,” while cultural figures and local codes of silence warn them that “snitches get stitches.” This chapter provides a historical perspective on the complexities and pitfalls of “D.A.R.E. America,” a society in which the police, activists, and cultural authorities fight over the seeing/speaking subjectivity of American youth.

Youngsters of the Dangerous Classes

It was not long ago that practically all the gamins of the poorer sections of American cities were regarded by the authorities as incipient criminals. Now the authorities seem bent on making all of them into police officials. Instead of the enemies of order, the youngsters are learning to be its guardians.

—New York City journalist, 19159

It’s no secret that America has long reserved a special anxiety for its youth, particularly youth of color and boys of the working class. The “boy problem,” as Julia Grant calls it,10 has given rise to countless moral panics about immorality, crime, and revolution from below. Such a problem has demanded the effort of a layered and multidirectional apparatus of conduct regulation. While in the nineteenth century public schools detained youth in a constantly monitored atmosphere, private institutions such as the Children’s Aid Society began to vie for these kids’ time outside of class. By providing working-class kids with the close mentorship of positive role models, these institutions worked hard to transform youth into productive and moral citizens.

For Charles Loring Brace, who founded the Children’s Aid Society in New York in 1853, these efforts at promoting child welfare could be best described as “moral disinfectants.”11 For Brace, poverty and crime were largely the result of a swelling underclass of undisciplined youth. To cure the cyclical social maladies of the “dangerous classes,” therefore, activists would have to intervene in the everyday lives of youth in order to make them a credit to society: “The objects of those engaged in laboring for this class are to raise them above temptation, to make them of more value to themselves, and to Society, and, if possible, to elevate them to the highest range of life.”12 For Brace, this meant disrupting the socially reproductive logics of working-class family life:

fathers die, and leave their children unprovided for; parents drink, and abuse their little ones, and they float away on the currents of the street; step-mothers or step-fathers drive out, by neglect and ill-treatment, their sons from home. Thousands are the children of poor foreigners, who have permitted them to grow up without school, education, or religion. All the neglect and bad education and evil example of a poor class tend to form others, who, as they mature, swell the ranks of ruffians and criminals. So, at length, a great multitude of ignorant, untrained, passionate, irreligious boys and young men are formed, who become the “dangerous class” of our city.13

For Brace, the kindred evils of alcohol use, neglectful parenting, irreligiousness, and poor education naturally gave rise to juvenile delinquency among the working class. Eventually it became clear to Brace that “what New York most of all needed was some grand, comprehensive effort to check the growth of the ‘dangerous classes.’”14 This grand, comprehensive effort included “Boys’ Meetings,” where youth were lectured about criminality and delinquency,15 and eventually grew to include industrial education and reading rooms where working-class kids could be chaperoned and supervised.16

While the comprehensive efforts aimed at governing working-class youth are a bit beyond the scope of this book,17 these early programs give important insight into how diverse organs of American culture have approached the task of youth correction. While private institutions like the Children’s Aid Society focused on things like cultural education, personal responsibility, and labor training, these programs often took on a unique inflection when they were guided by the state apparatus. Under the direction of public institutions, these activities naturally emphasized various forms of civic participation. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that in the hands of the police these activities were geared toward developing the habits and skills most valued by the police (in particular, communal vigilance, lateral surveillance, and crime reporting).

The Boy Police

At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of “Boy Police” patrols sprouted throughout the United States.18 As crime rose in many of the nation’s cities, burgeoning urban police departments sought to kill two birds with one stone: by recruiting a large number of young boys, the police could maximize their forces’ urban presence while also enticing youth to choose the side of law and order. Having kids police their own communities, therefore, was often an attempt to lure youth away from petty crime and into the orbit of responsible citizenship. A good case in point is the Des Moines Boy Police, which was formed in 1900 when the State of Iowa passed new laws against shooting fireworks at Fourth of July celebrations. Because the Des Moines police force was unable to enforce this new law over the entire city, a number of anxious citizens came forward with enforcement ideas. When one of these citizens suggested forming a company of Boy Police, a local activist, Elizabeth Jones-Baird, took it upon herself to organize the patrol.

Emphasizing “the sacred necessity of keeping the laws of the State,”19 Jones-Baird told her new recruits that if they ensured the other kids would keep the peace—and if they agreed to avoid early partying and shooting fireworks—then they would be appointed “special policemen.” According to a contemporary supporter of the Des Moines Boy Police project, this “idea of authority captivated the boys at once. . . . With acumen which would have put to shame many a regular detective these little fellows went to work to track down every specimen of explosive which was being secreted for the big celebration. They told all their young friends that they would be obliged to obey the law, or else be arrested.”20 The primary role of the Boy Police, therefore, was to patrol their towns and “track down” any of their peers’ youthful offenses (even as petty as swearing). By policing their peers’ conduct, the boys would absorb invaluable lessons in masculine duty and civic responsibility: as one observer put it, the Boy Police would force youth to “absorb the lessons of integrity, uprightness, and obedience” that policing teaches, thus “promoting those qualities of manliness, self-reliance, and order.”21

In nearby Council Bluffs, this holiday policing project was also adopted by Police Chief George Richmond. Starting in the early years of the twentieth century, from the first to the fifth of July twenty-five junior officers were recruited to keep tabs on their friends. According to an admiring journalist for the Chicago Examiner, Council Bluffs’ Boy Police project was a potent way to instill vigilant modes of responsible youth citizenship: “The children are interested in law and order, consider themselves the guardians of property, and are early inoculated with the spirit that makes for good citizenship. . . . They go about the task with all the vim and vigor with which other young Americans commemorate the day.”22 While most Americans viewed Independence Day as an opportunity to celebrate, Council Bluffs’ “diminutive bluecoats” spent the day patrolling the city and policing their peers. As the Examiner’s endorsement demonstrates, lateral surveillance was tied up with many Americans’ visions of patriotic duty. It is hardly surprising, then, that these patrols were first gathered to protect the sanctity of Independence Day, as young citizens celebrated their nation’s birth by surveilling their peers and ratting them out to local authorities.

This fervor for “boy police” was not confined to the sleepy fields of the Midwest. In New York City, Captain John Sweeney developed a Boy Police program designed to get budding young criminals off the streets. Sweeney, who presided over New York’s Fifteenth Police Precinct, recruited boys between the ages of eleven and fifteen to patrol their own neighborhoods. The captain divided his precinct into twelve zones, each under the command of a single boy lieutenant. The boys on a street block constituted a “vigilance committee” that was responsible for enforcing the law on that block. As an observing journalist with the Christian Endeavor World remarked: “With rare insight into the weakness of boy nature, Captain Sweeney marks out a path for his young friends. . . . Instead of letting them strut about the whole precinct, flashing their badges, he decrees that no junior policeman has any authority except in his home zone, and that his special duty is right on his own block—under the eyes of his parents and neighbors! Far from grumbling at this restriction, each vigilance committee is striving to outshine the rest and secure for its members the coveted honorable mention for ‘condition of the block.’”23 Key to Sweeney’s program, therefore, were a disciplined environment of supervision as well as a reward system that propelled a competitive spirit among the young officers.

While some critics objected that it was a mistake “to encourage the boys to undertake any such meddlesome and intolerable activity [because] their zeal would more than overbalance their possible good intentions,”24 Sweeney moved forward with his plans to discipline delinquent youths through police collaboration. As the ranks of his Northeast District Boy Police program swelled to three hundred members in 1917, Sweeney announced that the program went a long way toward “keeping the boys out of trouble”: “This problem is largely solved when the boyish love of adventure and mystery, which usually expresses itself in the exploits of criminal heroes of dime novels and the yellow press, is directed to the imitation of the deeds of the real heroes of American cities—the brave, honest, and unassuming members of the police force, in uniform and out.”25 By tapping into the untamed adventurousness of urban boys, Sweeney sought to channel that passion by having the boys imitate the “heroes” working in American police departments.

Yet this empowerment, of course, had important limitations: Sweeney stressed that the boys had to enforce the law without violence or physical engagement—their responsibilities were confined to various modes of seeing and saying. Their ultimate duties, he emphasized, were to file daily reports of criminal deeds and to “squeal” on anyone committing a crime: “The ‘Kid Cops’ avoid bullying and being bullied in enforcing the law. They carry no billies, and boast no ‘strong arm squad.’ If they can’t gain their purpose by being ‘polite’ and ‘helpful’ in accordance with their motto, they report to the senior force. . . . ‘Squealing’ has become the virtue of ‘loyalty to the force.’”26 In lieu of billy clubs and a “strong arm squad,” Sweeney’s Boy Police were outfitted with the weapons of speech and surveillance—“squealing” became the ultimate expression of their civic duty.

When a boy decided to join the Boy Police, Sweeney gave him a long list of responsibilities to learn by heart. Before reporting for duty, each cadet was required to memorize a pledge (“To do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the law . . .”), a short motto, and a list of eleven basic duties—the essential parameters of Boy Police conduct:

1. 1. Prevent swearing and vulgar language in the public street and public places.
2. 2. Prevent the building of bonfires in the streets.
3. 3. Prevent boys from breaking windows and street-lamps and from defacing buildings and sidewalks with chalk.
4. 4. Prevent boys from smoking cigarettes and playing crap.
5. 5. Prevent boys from engaging in dangerous or unlawful playing
6. 6. Prevent persons placing encumbrances or obstructions on fire-escapes.
7. 7. Prevent the mixing of ashes, garbage, and paper.
8. 8. See that garbage cans are kept covered, and that ash and garbage cans are promptly removed from the sidewalk when emptied.
9. 9. Request persons to keep the sidewalk and areaway in front of their buildings clean, and not to throw refuse into the street.
10. 10. Make special effort to perform duties 6, 7, 8, and 9 at your own homes. See that your parents and relatives do not violate the laws and ordinances.
11. 11. For the above purposes do not enter any building under any condition.27

Many of these duties revolved around carrying out surveillance on fellow youths—the Boy Police were charged with policing the language and conduct of their peers. Yet, as duty 10 makes clear, the boys were also required to keep an eye on their parents and families. The mission of the Boy Police, therefore, extended beyond carrying out surveillance and snitching on their peers. In fact, the boys’ biannual progress reports would give special marks for “personal influence,” which, in the words of Elizabeth Ellsworth Cook, a journalist with the Christian Endeavor World, measured a boy’s success “in persuading grown-ups to obey the law.”28 The uniformed kids of the New York Boy Police, therefore, were given rewards for turning their vigilance toward the adults in their families and communities.

Junior Coppettes

Boys were not the only targets of the NYPD’s youth responsibilization efforts. Alongside Sweeney’s Boy Police, teenage “Coppettes” monitored the streets of New York City. To complement its Boy Police program, in 1915 New York City recruited five hundred teenage girls to try out for a new girls’ patrol. After six months, fifty of these girls were selected for the program, and each selected Coppette was given a beat to monitor and patrol. The New York Times chronicled the activities of one of these girls, “Captain” Celia Goldberg, as she demonstrated the daily work of a “girl cop.” Outfitted with a blue cap and a brass-buttoned blue coat, young Captain Goldberg roamed her beat, looking for illegal and unsafe activities. Responding to a question about whether her fellow citizens took her seriously when she tried to enforce the law, Goldberg remarked: “Surely they obey. . . . They see this uniform and they know it means the law.”29

The responsibilities of Goldberg and other Coppettes, however, were somewhat different than those of the Boy Police. While the Boy Police often watched out for street crime and assaults, according to Goldberg the Coppettes had two main responsibilities: first, they kept a close watch over children and families, and only second did they police their neighborhoods for street crime. Goldberg reported, “Most of our work has to do with children and the home. . . . We have to see that our own mothers buy only pure, wholesome food, that our homes are clean, and that our own little brothers are well cared for. Then we are ready to take care of our other duties.”30 In fact, when describing her duties Captain Goldberg often emphasized her role in childcare: when walking their beats, “we take lost babies to their mothers. If we don’t know the baby we take it to the girl-policeman on the next block, and she usually does.”31 Through this gendered division of labor, the NYPD used the Coppettes to extend their sensory resources into the homes of New York families. While the girls would sometimes join the boys to stamp out petty crime, the Coppettes were primarily tasked with regulating the health and morality of their parents, their siblings, and the children in their neighborhoods. These duties included preventing children from watching motion pictures without their parents, “getting after” merchants who sold tobacco to minors, ensuring that grocers sold clean and healthful food, and reporting underage girls who would attempt to enter dancehalls.32

The Coppettes thus illustrate how certain distributions of youth responsibility helped expand the police’s sensory reach into the family and other social institutions. In its review of the Times article on Captain Goldberg and the other Coppettes, the Literary Digest posed: “the mind asks if this, or something like it, be not the ideal democracy, where every citizen is a policeman, assuming the responsibility not only for his own welfare and that of his family, but for the community at large, as well.”33 Of course, this idealistic rhetoric about democratic participation is nothing new: as this book has illustrated, police agencies and their supporters have routinely conflated democratic citizenship with the participatory policing of fellow citizens.

The Cowan Plan

From Berkeley, Spokane, and San Antonio to Washington, Boston, and Providence, the 1940s saw a tremendous upswing in programs that addressed juvenile delinquency through youth/police collaboration. Like Captain Sweeney’s Boy Police and the Junior Coppettes, the young officers of the Junior Police and Citizen’s Corps were tasked with patrolling their blocks, keeping neighborhoods clean, and safeguarding law and order.34 Historically, these programs tended to gain momentum during times of social upheaval. During World War Two, for example, as millions of men left their families to fight overseas, “juvenile delinquency” became an object of special social concern. Public figures like FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Estes Kefauver were quick to blame parents, and women in particular, for these social maladies.35 As women rushed to fill the jobs abandoned by men who had been drafted to fight the war, the specter of the idle child rankled many social welfare and law enforcement agencies.

As Malinda Lindquist has shown,36 this discourse of “juvenile delinquency” was often fueled by social anxieties over race, class, and gender that laid responsibility for rising juvenile crime rates at the feet of single working mothers (and especially women of color). To address this delinquency, nonprofit groups like the YMCA and the Boy Scouts organized after-school programs, summer camps, and recreation initiatives aimed at governing the conduct of working-class and African American youth.37 Local police departments, too, set their sights on these unparented “delinquents.” In 1942, for example, an African American Washington, D.C., police officer named Oliver Cowan developed a “Junior Police Corps” aimed at steering young African Americans away from a life of crime. According to Elizabeth Jean Stanton, a social worker who worked with Cowan’s Junior Police Corps in the 1940s, “The Negro Officer who initiated this club had hopes that through . . . encouragement, enlightenment, supervision, and a diversified activities program the Negro youth of Washington, D.C., would become worthy and better citizens of the community.”38

By recruiting students to keep watch over their schools and communities, Cowan aimed to transform these future criminals into productive young citizens. With the support of D.C. public schools, he organized citizen-youths into hierarchical patrols modeled on the civic police force. In less than a year, he had enlisted more than seven hundred boy cadets and one hundred girl “auxiliaries.”39 By 1944, that number had increased to nearly twelve hundred boys and more than three hundred girls.40 Cowan attributed his success to an interesting recruitment strategy that involved subverting the leadership of local youth gangs. He found that a great deal of youth crime in Washington was carried out by local gangs such as the Oil Burners, the Bulldozers, and the Bone Crushers. Rather than arresting the gangs and sending their members to juvenile homes or prison, Cowan floated the possibility of reorienting the gang’s efforts toward more socially constructive activities: “They are kids, actually, with a lot of energy, and they merely need direction. That energy could be used constructively rather than destructively if somebody showed them how to do it.”41

Cowan infiltrated these gangs by persuading their leaders to join the Junior Police Corps. In the spirit of a scheme put forward by legendary police official Eliot Ness,42 he offered gangs various social and communal resources in exchange for them abandoning crime and collaborating with local authorities. According to Cowan, he would approach gang leaders and say, “I know you know all about breaking the law. I guess you fellows know best how to get others to respect and obey it.”43 Surprisingly, he had a great deal of success in convincing youth gangs to carry out lateral surveillance in their communities. Before long, the gangs developed an alternative urban youth culture based in fighting crime. Their organizational manual, which the former gang members produced on their own and distributed to new members, declared: “Congress made the laws, we enforce them. . . . We as junior citizens are determined to abolish juvenile delinquency in our neighborhood.”44

Despite these successes, the Junior Police Corps and similar programs across the U.S. had unintended effects on local youth politics. On the one hand, integrating entire gangs into boy police programs prevented retaliation against newly recruited officers. By bringing whole gangs under the supervisory purview of the cops, boy police recruiters were able to reduce local crime while simultaneously forestalling retaliatory attacks from rebuffed gang leaders. But in many locales, animosity emerged between newly minted boy officers and the gangs that refused to join youth police programs. For example, in an attack that prefigured current anti-snitch campaigns, in 1951 several youths fired rifles at boy patrol officers while they were serving as crossing guards at an elementary school in Watseka, Illinois.45 These attacks simply triggered more intensive efforts by police to target crime and violence among youth, especially through programs aimed at permeating the opaque and rebellious student bodies of American schools.

Figure 4.1. A cop cultivates relationships with elementary school students in a Washington, D.C., classroom. Police Foundation, Experiments in Police Improvement, 4.

Just Say No

It isn’t snitching or betrayal to tell an adult that a friend of yours is using drugs and needs help. . . . It’s an act of true loyalty—of true friendship.

—Former Education Secretary William Bennett46

The Cowan Plan was simply one element of a much broader postwar effort to regulate the conduct of America’s “delinquent” youth. Fueled by a rampant moral panic about out-of-control teens,47 the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to a broad range of strategies for using police collaboration to channel kids toward the straight and narrow. As I discussed in Chapter Three, just as the rising crime of the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to adult citizens’ patrols, it also gave rise to new kid patrols.48 One of the most successful of these groups, the Bay Youth Courtesy Patrol in Washington, D.C., was organized by James Adler, a veteran social worker and probation officer. Adler founded his patrol in 1968, after a local woman was mugged by a violent youth gang. The victim turned out to be the mother of the gang’s leader, who decided to reform his organization into a responsible citizens’ youth patrol. According to Adler, the Courtesy Patrol adopted a familiar aim: “the primary goal of the patrol is crime prevention through surveillance of the neighborhood and diversion of potential delinquents into constructive (crime prevention) activity.”49 Even though many of their former friends and associates mocked them as a “snitcher patrol,”50 the Courtesy Patrol members took their seeing/saying citizenship seriously and eventually developed an official relationship with the D.C. police.

While the Police Athletic League, the “White Hats” in Tampa,51 and other junior police programs used badges, uniforms, and official titles to entice students to monitor their peers, nonprofit groups and police agencies began experimenting with a new model of youth governance that would turn everyday, sneaker-wearing kids into seeing/saying subjects. Searching for the best disciplinary space for carrying out these experiments in citizenship training, the police and their allies turned to public schools. As criminologist Denise Gottfredson has pointed out, “Schools have great potential as a locus for crime prevention. They provide regular access to students throughout the developmental years, and perhaps the only consistent access to large numbers of the most crime-prone young children in the early school years; they are staffed with individuals paid to help youth develop as healthy, happy, productive citizens; and the community usually supports schools’ efforts to socialize youth. Many of the precursors of delinquent behavior are school-related and therefore likely to be amenable to change through school-based intervention.”52 As scholars have long recognized,53 schools are outfitted with countless mechanisms for surveillance and correction: classroom design, detention, student “tracking,” examinations, and other disciplinary measures subject students to diverse pressures and programs of behavioral modification. To supplement the disciplinary surveillance that is so essential to the form and function of the modern school, police officials and allied institutions have introduced more flexible and modulating programs of surveillance. In fact, an essential characteristic of school programs like D.A.R.E. is their tendency to disrupt the asymmetry of traditional disciplinary relations. The surveillance monopolies typically held by teachers and parents, in particular, are challenged—while students have typically been monitored by their parents and teachers, they are now also faced with police-trained peers. This disruption hits its ironic zenith, perhaps, as police flip disciplinary surveillance structures on their heads by encouraging students to spy and snitch on their parents. Other differences, too, mark the spy-and-snitch programs promoted in today’s schools: in lieu of the uniformed police collaborators of the Junior Police clubs, seeing/saying students circulate more or less transparently among their peers.

The most influential and far-reaching of these programs has been D.A.R.E., which attempts to turn kids into weapons in the War on Drugs. Founded in 1981 by Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, the D.A.R.E. program emerged as part of Nancy Reagan’s “Say No to Drugs” campaign. The Reagan administration’s drug war, of course, took a mostly “supply-side” approach to fighting drugs; however, it also involved attempts to inoculate future drug users by targeting them with an assortment of policies and programs. One of these early intervention programs, Project SMART (Self Management and Resistance Training), was developed by researchers at the University of Southern California. Aimed at students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), Project SMART was a collaborative effort between USC professors and administrators at local public schools—police simply did not fit into the plan. Chief Gates, though, had hopes of building a closer relationship between Los Angeles public schools and the LAPD. He approached Project SMART and offered to help by bringing uniformed officers into the schools. Alarmed by the idea of having armed and uniformed officers act as mentors for students, the officials at Project SMART declined. Undeterred, Gates developed his own elementary school program that supplemented the SMART curriculum with police participation. Unpleased with Gates’s move, officials from Project SMART were quick to criticize how Gates and his associates assembled the D.A.R.E. program: according to a representative from SMART, “[D.A.R.E.] ripped off our materials,” and “they took a version of the program that we had radically revamped because it wasn’t working.”54 Yet D.A.R.E. quickly dwarfed Project SMART, gaining a national presence during the 1980s. Benefiting from massive drug-war grant initiatives, D.A.R.E. was able to spread to middle schools in 1986 and high schools in 1988.55

Active in seventy-five percent of American schools and in more than forty-three countries worldwide, and with annual expenditures exceeding one billion dollars, D.A.R.E. is today one of the most significant youth governance initiatives in the United States. While its central mission is still to “provide children with the information and skills they need to live drug and violence free lives,” in recent years it has added new areas of focus: Internet security, bullying, school safety, and “community safety” now rank among D.A.R.E.’s core concerns.56 To promote D.A.R.E.-approved conduct, uniformed police officers carry out a seventeen-session program that targets students from K-5 all the way to high school. In order to give these kids “the skills they need to avoid involvement in drugs, gangs, and violence,” D.A.R.E. takes pains to cultivate an interactive environment that helps students identify with the police officers in their schools. In many communities, like that facing Chief Gates in the early 1980s, D.A.R.E. has singled out youth of color for special police attention. According to Michael J. Stoil and Gary Hill, D.A.R.E. “was designed to respond to the specific needs of African American and Mexican American neighborhoods” in Los Angeles, and “sought to reduce distrust of law enforcement officers in communities where the police often were viewed as an alien, racist presence.”57 At a time when many poor people of color saw police targeting their neighborhoods with a curious mix of militancy and cold disregard, D.A.R.E. gave police officers a chance to improve community relations with the marginalized youth of these neighborhoods. Indeed, early D.A.R.E. police officer Anthony Piergallini has been clear on this aspect of its mission: “A big plus to this in my eyes was that if you put an officer in an elementary school classroom talking to kids at their level, not talking down to them, if you communicate with them, now you are not the frightening men in the blue uniforms with badges who are going to put you away. . . . Now, you are human beings. You are friendly guys. A lot of people still don’t understand the concept of how important this is.”58 D.A.R.E.’s mission, therefore, is more than simple “drug abuse resistance education”—as much as that, it seeks to build identification and empathy between youth and local police. Other D.A.R.E. figures, including DEA agent Robert Strange, have gone so far as to say that this identification outweighs the initiative’s educational value: “Forget about the drug education. . . . We saw a relationship that could be built between the students and the police officers. There’s no other vehicle for that that we’re aware of.”59

For D.A.R.E. officials, these “close and trusting” bonds of identification are essential because they make students more comfortable opening up about the forbidden habits of their friends and family members. In an assessment of its school outreach program, the Florida D.A.R.E. Officer’s Association asserts, “Because of these highly credible D.A.R.E. officers in the schools, students develop a close and trusting relationship. This relationship results in students letting officers know if Johnny has a gun in his backpack or about other potentially violent situations that may occur on campus.”60 According to the identification-building logic of D.A.R.E.’s school programs, putting cops into classrooms encourages students to assist the police in their crime-fighting mission. This logic is perhaps best expressed in the “Three R’s”—recognize, resist, report—promoted by many D.A.R.E. programs. While instruction in the “Three R’s” helps students “recognize” drugs and drug paraphernalia, they are also taught to recognize “suspicious” behaviors among their peers, friends, and family members.

D.A.R.E.: Keep Safe, Keep Away, Keep Telling

And of course, like the other lateral surveillance programs discussed in this chapter, D.A.R.E. has taken great pains to cultivate an appropriate speaking subjectivity in its young targets. It is unique, however, in that it actively targets elementary students as young as five, in kindergarten and prekindergarten.61 Through coloring books and games, D.A.R.E. promotes the same spy-and-snitch culture among kindergartners that, as we will see, it also encourages among older students. For instance, in the Child Safety Coloring and Activity Book, distributed by the Department of Justice in partnership with D.A.R.E., students are reminded—first and foremost—to “settle arguments with words, not fists or weapons.”62 And this classic liberal feature of seeing/saying discourse is not the book’s only lesson: cartoon characters—including D.A.R.E.’s tough animated lion, Daren—instruct students how and when to snitch on their peers and parents. Indeed, the most frequently touted theme in the little book is “KEEP SAFE, KEEP AWAY, KEEP TELLING.”63 The book is filled with instructions on how to “keep telling”—kids are encouraged to “tell” if someone “bothers” them online, if they see someone being picked on at school, and, above all, if they see evidence of drugs, weapons, or gang activity. Thus by honing students’ “communication, decision making, and refusal skills,”64 D.A.R.E.’s outreach materials instruct students in appropriate forms of communicative citizenship. The coloring book even contains a completion certificate where students sign their names, promising to exercise this communicative subjectivity while keeping a close eye on the conduct of their family and friends: “I [student name] take the Safety Pledge and promise to always be safe and help my family and friends practice safety first.”65 While these coloring books are a relatively innocuous manifestation of D.A.R.E.’s outreach arsenal, they illustrate the strong pressure that even the youngest kids face to scrutinize the conduct of their friends and family members.

To trace D.A.R.E.’s vision of success, we can also look at the student-written testimonials it promotes in official publications. D.A.R.E. Alaska, for one, uses testimonials to demonstrate that students are absorbing the program’s message. One young girl, Katrina, writes: “In D.A.R.E. I have learned that if someone walks up to me and tells me to do something that is bad or that I don’t feel comfortable with, then I need to say something that has the Three R’s and I need to make eye contact.”66 Other students, too, illustrated that they had mastered the “recognize, report, resist” procedure: Taylor writes, “D.A.R.E. has helped many people including myself make the right decisions. . . . I know that when I have a problem I need to tell an adult I trust. I would not have known that before I started D.A.R.E. I would have tried to solve any problem I have by myself and it would possibly get physical. Now I know that a fight should never have to get physical. I have learned how harmful drugs and alcohol is and I have learned how I can stop people from doing the wrong thing without getting violent.”67 Taylor’s testimony provides another illustration of how the perennial nonviolent imperative of lateral surveillance programs persists in youth initiatives like D.A.R.E.: surveillance and reporting are contrasted with “getting physical,” thus allowing little citizens to be of use to the state while delegating physical interventions to the police and other figures of authority.

Figure 4.2. A D.A.R.E. coloring activity shows students how to see something and say something. “Coloring Pages,” South Carolina D.A.R.E. Training Center. www.rcsd.net/dare.

A young D.A.R.E. Alaska student, Stephanie, demonstrated one of the most provocative lessons promoted by the group. She wrote that “the thing that is most important to me during the D.A.R.E. class is not to smoke not to do drugs or use drugs [sic]. . . . I will try to tell my mom to stop smoking or any body else that I know that smoke. I learned that if I smoke then I can get black lungs and you can’t join any kind of sports and you can’t run fast as you could.”68 While many of these students’ essays suggest the confusing and dubious quality of D.A.R.E. education (“black lungs,” for example), Stephanie pinpoints perhaps the most controversial element of the initiative’s school program: that it encourages students to police and snitch on their families.

D.A.R.E. to Snitch

Although D.A.R.E. is reticent about this element of its program, its policies, outreach materials, and cultural track record demonstrate that it creates an ideal environment in which youth learn to scrutinize and snitch on their parents. This aspect of D.A.R.E. education, in fact, has been central to its mission since the 1980s. In 1988, a D.A.R.E. implementation manual released by the U.S. Department of Justice explains that D.A.R.E. officers, like social workers and many other school administrators, are required to pursue tips of a criminal nature, even if those tips are shared in confidence.69 The manual even gives special instructions to officers who receive reports that parents are using “dope”70—that information, D.A.R.E. officers are informed, “cannot remain confidential.”71 When these mandatory reporting guidelines are combined with activities and outreach materials that promote recognizing and reporting, local police departments often find themselves pursuing the tips of a naïvely vigilant student.

Since at least the early 1990s, D.A.R.E. has been under fire for this element of its outreach. Publications like the Washington Post, Village Voice, and New Republic have criticized D.A.R.E. for its efforts to transform students into snitches. Despite the denials of administrators, many D.A.R.E. students, in fact, have used their recognize-and-report skills for just this purpose. In 1991, for example, a ten-year-old D.A.R.E. student in Colorado found a small stash of marijuana hidden in his parents’ bookshelf. Instead of confronting his parents, the boy called 911, informing the dispatcher that he was a “D.A.R.E. kid” and that he had found drugs in his home. When the parents were arrested, the boy’s local D.A.R.E. officer praised his actions. The next year, there were two separate cases in which Boston children who ratted on their parents showed their D.A.R.E. certificates to officers as they arrived to arrest their parents. According to Gary T. Marx, in the late 1980s school programs like D.A.R.E. led to Boston police authorities receiving twelve calls a day from kids turning in their parents for misdemeanor drug possession.72 And many parents of D.A.R.E. kids—including, of course, those of Crystal Grendell, whose story introduced this chapter—have been arrested and fired from their jobs after their children ratted them out for simple drug possession.73

In their research on youth/police collaboration, Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty have found “a fine line between [police officers in schools] providing a reactive ‘service’ and proactively recruiting informants.”74 That is, while the police often claim that they do not actively recruit informants from the student body, there is a fine line between “proactive recruitment” and the kind of spy-and-snitch encouragement engaged in by programs like D.A.R.E. In many cases, the distinction between reactive support and active recruitment seems to disappear. In Georgia, for example, a nine-year-old D.A.R.E. kid called the cops when he found a small stash of speed hidden in his parents’ bedroom. The cops showed up and arrested both of his parents, keeping his father in jail for three months. The distraught child said, “At school, they told us that if we ever see drugs, call 911 because people who use drugs need help. . . . I thought the police would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong. They never said they would arrest them. . . . But in court, I heard them tell the judge that I wanted my mom and dad arrested. That is a lie. I did not tell them that.”75 Indeed, naïve youth often recognize and report without understanding the potentially devastating consequences of their actions. We might also consider the tale of an elementary student in Matthews, North Carolina. In 2010, the fifth-grade boy sat with his peers during a D.A.R.E. lesson on the horrors of marijuana use. The boy was so affected by the lesson that he approached a D.A.R.E. officer, informing him that his parents sometimes smoked pot. To prove his point, the boy brought one of his parents’ joints to school. When the local police arrested the boy’s parents, social services removed the couple’s two children from the home. Remarking on the case, a Matthews police officer seemed undisturbed by the fact that the children had been taken from their home over misdemeanor marijuana possession. With a hint of pride, the cop remarked: “Even if it’s happening in their own home with their own parents, they understand that’s a dangerous situation because of what we’re teaching them. . . . That’s what they’re told to do, to make us aware.”76 While some cops might take pride in these successes, the cultivation of a spy-and-snitch ethic among youth has resulted in many kids unintentionally siding with the police against their friends and families, sometimes turning their lives upside down in the process.

The recognize/report mentality so characteristic of D.A.R.E., meanwhile, has seeped into other school programs. Combined with the entrepreneurial spirit of millennial neoliberalism, students are now learning that snitching pays—literally. Campus Crime Stoppers, the youth division of the national Crime Stoppers organization, offers cash rewards for students to snitch on their peers for drug offenses. Different rewards are meted out based upon the severity of the crime: while a student who reports marijuana possession might receive $200, a student who reports cocaine possession might be eligible to receive $500. For reporting certain drug offenses, in some jurisdictions students can be paid as much as $2,500. Some recent rewards divvied out by the Atlanta-area Campus Crime Stoppers include a seventy-five-dollar reward for snitching on a student who made a bong out of a Gatorade bottle; a $200 reward for turning in a classmate who possessed hydrocodone pills; and even a number of small rewards for students who ratted out their peers for skipping class.77 To fuel this entrepreneurial spirit among students, the police in many jurisdictions have built a digital reporting apparatus: if a student is bashful about snitching over the phone, tips can be emailed, texted, or submitted on Crime Stoppers’ mobile app, TipSubmit.78 As we saw in Chapter Two, these digital reporting systems tend to energize the spy-and-snitch culture that is already prominent in schools.

Stop Snitching vs. Keep Talking

While some kids are happy to scrutinize and snitch on their peers, D.A.R.E. and other youth policing efforts have ignited a number of remarkable resistance practices. Some of these emerge in response to the relatively juvenile efforts of youth-oriented anti-drug programs. The “D.A.R.E.” acronym and logo, of course, have become popular sites of satire. The iconic D.A.R.E bumper sticker, which features “D.A.R.E. TO KEEP KIDS OFF DRUGS” in large red letters, has been transformed into “D.A.R.E. TO KEEP COPS OFF DONUTS.” Progressive organizations like Students for Sensible Drug Policy have designed their own apparel that raises awareness about the dangers of D.A.R.E.—one of their shirts, for example, calls on fellow students to “D.A.R.E. TO RESIST THE WAR ON DRUGS.” And aside from these socially conscious critiques, many students simply reject the D.A.R.E. message out of hand. In a Village Voice article, Martha Rosenbaum, a former director at the Lindesmith Center, pointed out that D.A.R.E.’s freebie promotion culture makes it an easy object of teen critique. For Rosenbaum, the graduation certificates, tee shirts, pens, banners, coloring books, pennants, rulers, bumper stickers, and stuffed animals help make D.A.R.E. a corny cultural icon: “What happens is that the culture takes these messages and twists them around. . . . [W]hich is what happened with the ‘This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs’ commercials. And now there’s a whole T-shirt line that’s a spoof.”79 Many of D.A.R.E.’s middle and high school targets, in particular, are too culturally sophisticated to take the program seriously, and local police agencies are unlikely to get much help from them.80

Yet D.A.R.E. and allied youth spy-and-snitch program have also fueled more politically provocative critiques. The boy patrol officers who were shot in Watseka, Illinois, in 1951 are not the only youth/police collaborators to have elicited violence from local criminals and gangs. Abiding by what Elijah Anderson calls the “code of the street”81—a code of silence, solidarity, and police resistance that is prominent in many urban communities—a large number of teenagers actively resist the speaking/snitching subjectivity promoted by agencies like D.A.R.E. Articulations of this code of the street include the “Stop Snitching” movement, which has become popular in recent years due to the high cultural profile carried by some of its advocates. While the Stop Snitching movement is not exclusively a youth phenonenon, it has had an especially significant impact on youth culture. Hip-hop, in particular, has been a driving force behind the Stop Snitching movement, as artists like NWA, Busta Rhymes, Lil’ Kim, Project Pat, and Cam’ron have taken public stances against police cooperation.82 As Rachel Waldoff and Karen Weiss have observed, these elements of hip-hop culture endorse “a ‘stop snitching’ message aimed at black urban youth that implores listeners to refrain from police cooperation in all circumstances, whether simply reporting crime or becoming an official informant.”83 Hip-hop, which plays such an important role in defining many urban youth cultures, helps galvanize resistance to the diverse spy/snitch initiatives promoted by the police (including 911 and other crime reporting apparatuses).

The Stop Snitching movement entered the popular imagination in 2004, when basketball star Carmelo Anthony appeared in an amateur documentary called Stop Snitchin’! Anthony’s controversial appearance gave the code of the street bourgeois credibility, and Stop Snitching rhetoric gained prominence among many American youth communities.84 “Snitching” was tagged on metal stop signs, Stop Snitching shirts and bumper stickers became cult favorites, and other items of Stop Snitching outreach soon gained a cultural esteem among urban youth that D.A.R.E. could never obtain. And much of the Stop Snitching ethos, of course, centered on the violent implications of snitch resistance—many of the shirts and stickers were emblazoned with guns and knives, featuring slogans such as “Snitches Are a Dying Breed” and “Danger: Snitch at Your Own Risk.” In fact, in recent years “snitches get stitches” has become a rallying cry among many youths and young adults, and kids who rat out their peers often find themselves faced with violent retaliation. Indeed, some scholars have argued that the Stop Snitching campaign has had a palpable effect on murder prosecutions, as a number of high-crime urban jurisdictions (such as Baltimore, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.) have suffered falling murder conviction rates since the emergence of the movement.85

In 2007, the National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) released a report on these anti-snitching pressures. Among students who had witnessed gang-related crime, one half never reported it to authorities. The primary reason they neglected to report crime, the report found, was that they feared being attacked for snitching. According to the authors, “Interviews made clear that being labeled a snitch carries a price, not just of potential violence, but of ostracism by neighbors and peers.”86 In many communities, this threat of violence is very real: in October 2009 a fifteen-year-old Florida boy, Michael Brewer, called the cops after a fellow student stole his father’s bicycle. When the suspect was released from police custody, he and four of his friends confronted Brewer outside his parents’ apartment complex. Yelling, “He’s a snitch! He’s a snitch!,” the boys doused the fifteen-year-old with rubbing alcohol and set him on fire. Brewer suffered second- and third-degree burns on eighty percent of his body, and the ringleaders of the attack were charged with attempted murder.87

Alarmed by the cultural climate that fuels this kind of anti-snitch violence, the NCVC argues that more resources should be spent on convincing youth to communicate with police. Recommending media outreach campaigns that are aimed at “counter[ing] community ‘norms’ against snitching,”88 the authors stumbled upon the same counter-strategy designed by the City of Baltimore during the heart of the Stop Snitching controversy. While kids were being urged through numerous cultural channels to cut off communication with cops, Baltimore kicked off its “Keep Talking” campaign. To compete with the Stop Snitchin! documentary and the other cultural products that shore up the code of the street, Baltimore police officers drove around in police vans labeled “Keep Talking” and handed out their own documentary DVDs and T-shirts.89 With this “guerrilla communications” campaign,90 the police sought to threaten local gangs and ensure that potential witnesses did not feel intimidated into silence. This struggle over urban youth’s speaking subjectivity, of course, spread beyond the streets of Baltimore: federal initiatives spawned considerable research on how to keep youth talking. The NCVC, for example, urged authorities to enlist cultural figures that could compete with the likes of Carmelo Anthony, Lil’ Kim, and Busta Rhymes: “Communities should enlist spokespeople who are credible to youth—hip-hop artists and DJs, trusted youth workers and faith leaders, and youth themselves—to deliver the [“Keep Talking”] message through various media.”91 This emphasis on media caught on with other seeing/saying programs—such as the “You Bet I Told” campaign in Washington, D.C.—which also used media outreach to promote snitching subjectivity among urban teens.92

Despite the NCVC’s dreams of a star-studded cultural campaign, its naïve “Keep Talking” message has failed to gain traction in most urban communities. Opposed to the Department of Justice’s ideal vision of sympathetic, seeing/speaking teenagers, local social realities push many kids to resist this speaking subjectivity. A Washington Post report revealed the depth of police resistance that exists in these communities: according to a seventeen-year-old student, “Around here, it’s not even a question of being a snitch. . . . [Y]ou’re liable to get killed.”93 A sixteen-year-old girl gave a similar response: “No matter how bad I wanted to tell . . . I feel if I snitched, I would be putting my life in danger because people with guns feel they have more power than people who don’t. You just don’t feel safe, no matter what. And then if those people get arrested, they’ll have other people get you. That’s how it is.”94 Seeing and saying, therefore, has become a dangerous civic duty in many communities, and authorities are playing with fire when they promote a spy/snitch culture among youth. Yet despite these teens’ testimony, and despite the abundant evidence that snitching puts kids’ lives in danger, the NCVC recommends that police develop closer relationships with youth so that they learn appropriate habits of seeing and saying. As the NCVC report concludes, “Perhaps, in the end, to assume their civic duties (including reporting crime and testifying in court), youth in high-crime urban areas require no more than any other youth—a sense that adults care about what they say and are looking out for their safety.”95 For the NCVC and its allies, getting kids to “assume their civic duties” ranks a bit higher than protecting them from retaliatory violence—and much higher, needless to say, than addressing the systemic problems of poverty and injustice that breed the conditions in which urban kids have to fear brutality from criminal gangs and the police alike.

Conclusion

Beyond the violence and threats that fuel the Stop Snitching movement, many local critics of youth/police collaboration level thought-provoking critiques against the spy/snitch culture promoted by programs like D.A.R.E. and its antecedents. Some of the students interviewed by NCVC, in fact, revealed a deeply entrenched “us vs. them” mentality in urban communities. For these kids, siding with the cops meant siding against their friends, families, and neighbors. As one student remarked: “We won’t go on their side, ‘cause they’re not on our side. People don’t trust the police.”96 So while youth/police collaboration programs attempt to bridge this divide by convincing kids to “keep talking,” they face an uphill battle. In many urban communities, drug dealers and gangs work hard to keep local youth on their side—they do palpable good for their communities, for example, by financing after-school programs and conducting other outreach to youngsters. When explaining why he appeared in the Stop Snitchin’! video, Carmelo Anthony described why many urban teens learn to respect the drug dealers in their communities: “Drug dealers funded our programs. . . . Drug dealers bought our uniforms. . . . They just wanted to see you do good.”97 For the kids who benefit from the generosity of local dealers, that benevolence paints a stark contrast to the hostility they encounter from most cops. While some students might see a friendly D.A.R.E. officer at their schools, many urban kids, like Carmelo Anthony, grow up watching cops bully, harass, and even assault their friends. So when youth/police programs attempt to finesse a competing structure of loyalty among these kids, their efforts often fall on deaf ears.

There is another basic flaw in the logic of youth/police collaboration. Let’s reflect on a statement put forward by the National Center for Victims of Crime: “Reporting illegal behavior of gang members needs to be viewed as positive action that benefits the community rather than the act of a ‘snitch.’ School authorities, law enforcement officers, faith leaders, and popular personalities such as radio DJs and recording artists can play important roles in bringing about this kind of change in the youth culture.”98 Of course, no matter how hard the state and its allies attempt to develop a “cool” snitching culture, we can count on young people to rebel against it. As Dick Hebdige taught us in the 1980s, breaking rules and challenging the law draws the attention that most young people crave: “When young people do these things, when they adopt these strategies, they get talked about, taken seriously, their grievances are acted upon. They get arrested harassed, admonished, disciplined, incarcerated, applauded, vilified, emulated, listened to. . . . There is a logic to transgression.”99 In its vigorous quest to turn kids into the eyes and ears of the police, the state and its allies ignore this logic of transgression. While D.A.R.E. programs will continue to convince some students to snitch on their peers, friends, and families, the police will never be able to couple their monopoly on violence with a monopoly over youth culture. With seeing/saying initiatives playing such an important role in the War on Drugs, the state, gangs, and resistance groups will continue to wage cultural battles over the speaking subjectivity of tomorrow’s youth. Undoubtedly, these battles will become more intense as the state attempts to preempt Stop Snitching culture by approaching citizens at their most vulnerable and impressionable stages of life.