Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [682]

Oh, I’ll bet he hated to mention it. Damned bastard! But nobody backed him up. The cops went nosing around the neighborhood, but no one else admitted knowing anything about a fight. After all, they knew Dad didn’t kill Keith. And they knew the cops liked to solve cases by “discovering” evidence against whomever they decided must be guilty. Best to give them nothing. They never helped when people called for help. They came later, and more often than not, made a bad situation worse. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 682

Note

The community’s silence is shown as strategy rather than apathy: the sarcastic “Oh, I’ll bet he hated to mention it” collapses into invective, then the passage cools into a measured account of why withholding information is the only rational act. The scare quotes around “discovering” do the whole indictment of the police in one word.