We don’t often report on the happenings of our neighbor to the north, Baltimore. But the picture above — which I snapped on the Orange Line on Friday night — reflects a sentiment and phenomenon that has plagued Baltimore in recent years and has been receiving national billing since.

This week’s Time features an article on the ‘Stop Snitching’ movement that has swept Baltimore’s rough-and-tumble neighborhoods, and has thus far complicated the efforts of the city’s police to crack down on crime. The article reads:

Few cities have it quite as bad as Baltimore. The city’s highest-crime areas tend to be close-knit, insular communities where everybody knows everybody else’s business, including who’s talking to the police. Mix in a high-stakes drug trade and a flood of handguns, and you have a recipe for a pitiless war on witnesses. Baltimore’s problems first made national news in 2002 when a family of seven were killed in an arson attack after they helped police identify drug dealers in their neighborhood. The climate of fear has only worsened since then. In 2004 it even got a slogan–Stop Snitching–with the appearance of an underground DVD with that title.

The District doesn’t seem to suffer from the same phenomenon, but it’s not a stretch to assume that it’s likely bubbling beneath the surface. Crime has been on the rise since last year, and the police department’s work in closing cases would no doubt be complicated if witness intimidation became a larger problem than it currently is. The District’s crime has migrated northwards out of the city, so might we soon see the ‘Stop Snitching’ movement making its way down?