My building, like many others in Oakland, bears a sign that reads “THIS IS A NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH COMMUNITY. WE IMMEDIATELY REPORT ANY AND ALL SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY TO THE POLICE.”
On the surface there wouldn’t seem to be any problem with this. The “community” has always been its own first line of defense against violence and crime. People use their common sense to define “suspicious activity.” For instance, to me, it’s suspicious when someone is slowly pedaling a bicycle up and down the street, peering into the windows of every parked car. I’ve had my car broken into umpteen times; I don’t want it to happen again to me or any of my neighbors.
But as we know, people who do call the police to report “suspicious activity” often are called racists, and the behavior they report (such as someone riding a bike peering into car windows) is sarcastically described as a kind of BBQ Becky-like “biking while Black.” But we’ve said nothing about race here; the “suspicious activity” is not skin color, but the activity itself.
Police departments routinely are criticized for “implicit bias” against people of color because they tend to arrest POC out of proportion to their percentage of the population. The media hound cops for it; so do anti-police activists. Individual police departments take the charge seriously; the Oakland Police Department has taken extraordinary steps to identify and eliminate any theoretical bias in their officers, even establishing its own Race and Equity Team.
When the cops respond to suspicious activity, it’s because some safety-minded citizen reported it to them. Cops themselves have often been accused of stopping, searching and detaining people of color out of proportion to their percentage of the population, but remarkably little attention has been given to the citizens who report suspicious behavior (beyond rare incidents involving freaks like BBQ Becky). But now, those who call the police to report suspicious behavior are having the slur of racism thrown at them. The San Francisco Chronicle’s race columnist, Justin Phillips, just wrote that people who call 911 (and right now there’s no other number to call) are the “guilty party” when it comes to reporting suspicious behavior. Here’s a quote from Justin’s Sunday column:
“If we truly want the police to stop profiling people who are non-white and non-cisgender, then the public needs to stop asking them to.”
Talk about blaming the victim! There’s so much to unpack here. Let me begin with Justin’s reference to “non-cisgender” people. As a member of the LGBTQ spectrum, I’m highly offended by his effort to drag trans people into his theory of race. Justin views his job as defending Black people, regardless of what they’ve done or been arrested for. His problem is that this is getting harder, as evidence builds that, in the Bay Area, Black people are responsible for a huge chunk of crime. Justin knows this, so by coupling Black people in with “non-cisgender” people, he both inflates the population that is being “profiled” and, at the same time, appeals to the emotional sympathies of the large number of LGBTQ residents and their supporters who live in the Bay Area. It’s as if he’s saying, “If you support non-cisgender rights, then you have to be upset by the number of Black people getting arrested.”
But people aren’t afraid of “non-cisgender” people. They’re afraid of violent criminals, a group that most certainly doesn’t include transsexuals.
A related serious problem is Justin’s use of the word “profiling.” We all agree that we don’t want cops to profile anyone. But if I see someone biking slowly down my block peering into parked car windows, and that person is Black, and I report it to 911, am I “profiling” the individual? Obviously not. I’m doing exactly what Neighborhood Watch asks me to do: reporting suspicious behavior. And if the cops show up (unlikely) and stop the guy, are they “profiling” him, or are they merely responding to my call? Clearly, it’s the latter.
Look: people who are just out for a bike ride don’t cruise slowly inches from the driver’s windows of parked cars scanning their interiors. That is not innocent behavior; in fact, it’s downright suspicious. But Justin apparently can’t stand the fact that Black people make up such a high percentage of arrests in the Bay Area. To him, that is prima facie evidence of racism.
If it was up to Justin Phillips, no one should ever call the police to report anything. After all, we don’t want to be the “guilty party.” Maybe this is why the anti-police crowd—people like Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas, Sheng Thao and Cat Brooks—try so hard to defund the police. If we take away OPD’s budget, one of the first departments to suffer layoffs will be the 911 operators. If the cop-haters manage to shut down 911, then there will be no more reports of suspicious behavior, and all will be well in quiet, safe Bedlam—I mean Oakland.
Steve Heimoff