WASHINGTON—One of Chukundi Salisbury’s close friends, fellow anti-violence activist Tyrone Love, was murdered in 2009. The case remains unsolved. The people who know something, Salisbury says, refuse to talk to the police.

Salisbury has tried for more than a decade to convince Seattle residents to abandon the street code of “no snitching.” Now he has a new hurdle to overcome. It’s the president of the United States.

Donald Trump was rattled this week by the news that his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, had decided to plead guilty to crimes, implicate Trump, and offer to co-operate with prosecutors. In response, the “law-and-order” president adopted the language of a crime boss.

Trump called Watergate star witness John Dean a “rat.” He congratulated former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted Tuesday of tax fraud and bank fraud, for refusing to “break” under prosecutor pressure. He said it is “brave” to stay silent. And he declared that it “almost ought to be illegal” to become a “flipper.”

Trump’s words have been denounced by his political critics. They may be especially disheartening to activists who have fought “no snitching,” some of whom say the president’s stance will make their work harder and make the streets more dangerous.

“These guys believe in trickle-down everything else, they love trickle-down economics. Why wouldn’t they think that this would trickle down?” said Salisbury, an activist, marketing professional and DJ. “At the end of the day, he has influence.”

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The president criticizing co-operation with law enforcement, Salisbury said, encourages citizens victimized by crime to seek their own retribution rather than work through the legal system.

“We’re talking about white-collar crime with the president. And unfortunately, with some of the folks who are going to take him literally, we’re talking about violent crime. And if people are going to say, ‘We’re not rats, we’re going to go and handle this ourselves,’ it really endangers everybody,” he said.

Donald Samuels, an activist, school board member and former city councillor in a high-crime part of Minneapolis, has struggled against “no snitching” for about 20 years. With Trump’s remarks, he said, “the moral argument has suffered a severe blow.”

When he talks to “wayward” young people on the streets, Samuels said, they often respond that police officers have their own “no snitching” code when it comes to each other. The president using words like “rat,” he said, will make them more secure in the belief that refusing to co-operate is the way even polite society operates.

“Believe me, this is not lost on the criminal community. It’s a reinforcement of everything they have held true and dear. Basically, they’re saying, ‘See? It’s done at every level, so just back off. Snitches get stitches at every level. This is not a gang phenomenon or a criminal phenomenon; this is a societal norm,’” he said.

Trump’s remarks dismayed William “Rocky” Brown III, a pastor and police chaplain in Chester, Pa., who once led a successful campaign to pressure local stores to cease their sales of “stop snitching” T-shirts.

“I’m appalled and extremely disheartened. I’m not shocked because I expect anything from Trump, but that’s downright gangster,” Brown said.

He said Trump’s words would “encourage those who live on the wrong side of life.” Like other activists, though, he noted that the reason many people refuse to co-operate is not the supposed African-American cultural problem alleged by some conservatives but a rational fear of being harmed for talking.

“There’s a sense of danger within the community to report a crime because of retaliation. And there’s not a witness protection program on a local level,” he said.

Traci Fant, an activist in Greenville, S.C., who has called for people to come forward about the disappearance of a baby girl, said Trump is so poorly respected in her community that his comments were unlikely to affect residents’ views on co-operating. “It would have been different if another president said it,” she said.

But she marvelled anyway. The president who says he wants the death penalty for drug dealers, she said, is talking as if he is “the drug dealer that’s getting snitched out.”

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“He has a mentality of corruption,” she said. “Does he not realize that what he’s saying now is a street-level drug dealer should not snitch on the kingpin and take the whole organization down?”

Salisbury tried to find a bright side. He said this president has such a long history as a bad role model that it would be easier for parents in his community to explain to their children that Trump is wrong here. And he said the president’s words could force Trump voters into uncomfortable conversations with their own children.

“Can you really ride around with a Trump sticker on the back of your truck now and tell your kid not to lie in school or tell us who did it? You know, somebody broke the window. Can you really tell your kid to tell the truth? And being this Trump supporter: what if your kid says, ‘Hey, well, I’m not a rat.’ Now what?”

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