Nice kid, huh? Ratted out her parents.
Where's she going to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas now?
I'll let you in on a secret. Joseph Stalin himself hated people that ratted out their families.
Of course he did accept the information and cheerfully shipped the people off to the gulags. Still, he never did trust them figuring that anyone that would rat out their families had no character or integrity to begin with. If they couldn't be loyal to their own family then who could they be loyal to? Squealers were not to be trusted.
The police don't really respect snitches, either. Especially the petty little ones where there is no real victim to begin with.
Of course the police actually are grateful to someone that reports a legitimate crime and respect someone for doing so but petty snitches are not up there in the average cops list of people they respect. They also wonder about what the squealer is trying to hide.
Cops figure there's something cowardly in a person that would use the police department to settle a petty squabble. It's common knowledge that criminal types report each other to eliminate competition. What a lot of people fail to realize that as a government gone amok will turn on its very squealers.
I read where during the Stalin purges one government official had a regular snitch come in and report a farmer that had kept a small portion of his crop for his own use. He looked at where the farmer lived. The farm was some distance away and he didn't feel like making the trip so instead of going to the farm he arrested the squealer for 'low moral character' and had her shipped to the Gulag.
A lot of people think that the tip lines are totally condidential but in reality they are not. Policemen have access to them, of course. Policemen also have friends and neighbors outside of the department and occasionally let a few things slip.
For that matter a policeman had a quiet word with me once about something I was doing and said someone had reported me twice. (I was shooting a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun at a target inside a BB catcher and had an embankment hill as a backstop in case of a miss. It was nothing dangerous. It's the same BB gun Ralphie got for Christmas in a Christmas story)
It took me about 2 seconds to figure out who the snitch was. She later outed herself but I won't say how.
It's actually pretty easy to make someone out themselves. I had some kid that was stealing 550 paracord from my ham radio antenna for a while. I posted a couple of signs in the backyard declaring the area to be a former military training area and to watch for unexploded ordinance.
Three days later a policeman showed up and asked me about the signs.
"Oh, that." I replied. "The kids keep vandalizing my antenna. Now go to the mother that reported it and tell her that if my antenna is vandalized again you are going to come and arrest her son. I put that signage up to get some mother to out her kid".
After the cop stopped laughing he said he'd take it from there. About 45 minutes later he reported back and told me I wasn't likely to have any more problems. He had spoken to the mother.
I didn't ask the cop who it was and he didn't tell me but a few days later the kid outed himself to me when he saw me in the yard gardening.
Recently the STASI records were released in East Germany. The Germans opted not to release the list of who had reported who but I have heard that parts of it are getting out through various and nefarious sources. They figured that about one in six was a snitch.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of quiet vengeance taking place in East Germany when someone finds out who it was that ratted out their favorite uncle Fritz and had him carted off in the middle of the night.
Another thing to remember, too. Some of the first people Stalin purged were many of the intellectuals and others that had supported him early on. He figured if they could get him into power they could get him booted out of power.
If you spot someone committing a legitimate crime, by all means report it. If not simply shut the hell up. On the other hand, if you don't know the difference like an awful lot of people don't you really ought to simply keep quiet.To a lot of little bored suburban wives, a man leaving a supermarket and throwing his mask down in the parking lot is a major bioterrorist threat worthy of a panicky call to the FBI. I's not. It's simply littering.
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