Shootings shake a community, and fear becomes an accomplice

It is a sunny day in a coffee shop that stands at a busy intersection in Dorchester, a Boston neighborhood.

It has been almost a decade since Isaura Mendes's son was murdered. Yet even as she tells the story of that evening - the night Bobby was fatally stabbed in the chest - she still looks furtively behind her when she speaks.

Her son's killer is still at large, and it is a swirl of rumors that has helped her piece together the words and actions leading to the murder. The word "snitch" stands out - apparently uttered before Bobby was stabbed.

And it is that word that still resonates here in Dorchester, a neighborhood that's among the most diverse in Boston but riddled with pockets of neglect.

"People are afraid to come forward," says Ms. Mendes, who wears a lapel pin portrait of her son wherever she goes. Over the past decade, she has not been the only one in her family to have lost a child to street violence. Two of her sisters have also lost sons, and another nephew is paralyzed from a bullet.

Yet Mendes herself is still not sure she'd come forward to testify if a gun were fired before her eyes.

"People are afraid, afraid for their lives," she says. "You don't feel that you are protected."

It's that sense of vulnerability that has distressed prosecutors and police officers, as they have watched silenced by fear of retribution, especially when gangs are believed to be involved.

Experts say that tactics of intimidation are as central to gang culture as turf, and date back to the earliest street gangs. But across the country, many say that gang intimidation has grown not just more pervasive, but more brazen. Technology has played a role, as gangs use everything from video cameras to cellphones to warn witnesses not to step forward. The money involved in the drug trade has also raised the stakes for many gangs. The result is scores of unsolved cases.

This "don't tell" culture that has permeated many communities has never been adequately addressed, beginning with bullying in elementary school and including widespread mistrust of police, says Carl Taylor, a criminologist at Michigan State University who witnessed intimidation firsthand growing up in Detroit in the 1960s. "You learn at a very early age that you'd better not tell," he says, "you'd better not snitch."

In Boston, where gangs are far less entrenched than in Chicago or Los Angeles, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley says that witnesses are still intimidated in almost every case involving gangs or other violent crime.

This spring, a video was found in a case involving the unlawful possession of a gun, in which the defendant and his friends were telling people on tape to "stop snitching." In another case, gang members delivered copies of a grand jury transcript to apartments in a Boston housing project, as if to say, "we know who you are." Gangs often fill the benches of courtrooms, deterring witnesses who are about to testify.

Mr. Conley urged legislators recently to give better protection to witnesses of violent crime and more harshly penalize those who threaten them. It has become a particular concern here, as 60 homicides this year have been attributed, in part, to gang activity.

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