From Starbucks to Hashtags: Why White Americans Call the Police on Black People

[masagipatron]

She's claiming to be autistic and half Puerto Rican.

 

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Smith College Employee Called Police On Black Student Eating Lunch
“All I did was be black,” Oumou Kanoute said.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/smith-college-student-police_us_5b630b98e4b0fd5c73d6ee6d

A Smith College employee called the police on a black student who was eating lunch in a common area because she “seemed to be out of place,” the school said.

The student, Oumou Kanoute, is working at Smith College as a teaching assistant and residential adviser over the summer. She said she was taking a break from work on Tuesday when a police officer approached her and asked why she was there.

“I did nothing wrong, I wasn’t making any noise or bothering anyone,” Kanoute wrote in a Tuesday Facebook post. “All I did was be black.”



Kanoute said the incident made her “nervous” and caused emotional distress to her.

“No student of color should have to explain why they belong at prestigious white institutions,” Kanoute wrote. “I worked my hardest to get into Smith, and I deserve to feel safe on my campus.”

Smith College said in a statement that the officer who responded to the call found nothing suspicious. The college also said it plans to investigate the employee who called the police and provide support to Kanoute.

“This incident has raised concerns in our community about bias and equity,” Title IX coordinator Amy Hunter said. “Smith College does not tolerate race- or gender-based discrimination in any form. Such behavior can contribute to a climate of fear, hostility and exclusion that has no place in our community.”

Kanoute wrote another Facebook post on Wednesday asking for support for her request to the school administration to release the name of the employee who reported her to the police.

“I demanded that the administration share the name of the person who made the 9-1-1 call so that they can confront and acknowledge the harm done to me as [a] student,” Kanoute said.

The post has received more than 500 shares as of Thursday morning. Smith College said it has received multiple requests to release the name of the complainant, but school policy prohibits the release of names in campus police records.

Similar incidents of police being called on black people while doing everyday activities have increasingly dominated the news as individuals film the racist incidents.

A white woman whom the internet dubbed “Barbecue Becky” called the cops on a black family barbecuing in Oakland, California, in April. In May, a black student at Yale University was napping in a common area when a white student called the police on her.

Last month, a woman who stopped to give some supplies to a homeless man outside of a California grocery store had the police called on her for suspected shoplifting.

 

[DCAllAfrican]

She cried like a little kid. LOL

 

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New Mexico Store Clerk Caught on Video Calling 911 on Man for Being ‘Arrogant’ and ‘Black’



http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...rk-caught-on-video-calling-911-on-man-for?amp

A college student visiting New Mexico says he was racially profiled by a store clerk who was captured on camera calling the police, saying she wanted the student to the leave the store because he was being "arrogant" and "black."

Jordan McDowell, a 22-year-old Xavier University student who was visiting Santa Fe, recorded part of the exchange between him and the Allsup clerk on his cell phone.

In footage captured of the incident, the employee can be heard saying while on the phone with what is presumed to be a 911 dispatcher: "And I want him out of the store right now."

The employee can then be heard saying after pausing momentarily, "because he's being arrogant, because he's black."

"In that moment, the only thing I felt at that small moment was rage," McDowell told KRQE of the incident, which occurred last Friday. "But at the same time, too, I understood that racism in America never truly died."

McDowell said the employee called the police on him after he purchased some Sour Patch Kids and proceeded to look around for other items to buy.

That's when McDowell said he noticed the clerk "had been in the corner the whole time watching" him.

"They said I was sketchy because I picked stuff up, put stuff back," McDowell told the local station.

McDowell said after the police arrived he and the clerk spoke with an officer who determined he hadn't done anything wrong.

The store clerk repeatedly denied speaking of the student's race when talking to the local station, even after being showed the clip of the incident.

Allsup's corporate offices also did not return the local station's request for comment.

However, a man who identified himself as the store manager of the local Allsup's called the woman's behavior unacceptable.

 

[MalcolmNewton]

..

 

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Arrested Teen Says His Teacher Called The Police On Him For Wearing A Bandana To School
After six hours, the teen was released and is currently suspended from school for nine days.

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5b75a4a0e4b0182d49b1bab4

A group of high school students launched a peaceful protest to support a classmate whose teacher reportedly called the police on him because he wore a bandana.

On Friday, 17-year-old Valentino (whose last name is omitted to protect his privacy), a new student at Apache Junction High School in Arizona, was headed to lunch when a teacher asked him to remove his blue bandana.

On previous occasions, Valentino says, he complied when asked to remove the accessory, but after several months of seeing other students — “who are usually white” — wear it without penalty, Valentino continued to wear it. Not just a fashion statement, the bandana holds significance to Valentino as a tangible reminder of a difficult childhood.

“I told the teacher that I would remove the bandana if others did the same,” Valentino tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “She said, ‘If you don’t remove it, I will call the police.’ I said, ‘If you need to call them, you should,’ and walked back to my lunch table.”

PHOTO: YOUTUBE/MY LIL WOODY
A high school student named Valentino says a teacher at Apache Junction High School in Arizona called the police on him for not removing his bandana.

Valentino says the teacher made a radio call and then approached him with a police officer, who suggested that his bandana was gang paraphernalia — which the teen denies — and a violation of the school’s code of conduct, which prohibits “the use of hand signals, graffiti, or the presence of any apparel, jewelry, accessory, or manner of dress or grooming that, by virtue of its color, arrangement, trademark, symbol, or any other attribute indicates or implies membership or affiliation with such a group.”

“When I asked the officer what was wrong with my bandana, he said, ‘It’s blue and other people have ruined that color,’” says Valentino. “I pointed to a student wearing a bandana with an American flag pattern, and he said, ‘That’s for America.’”



Valentino says the police officer threatened to arrest him for not complying, to which he answered, “I didn’t break the law and I don’t understand the problem.’”

That’s when students began filming the scene, five minutes of which was uploaded to YouTube.

“The officer said it had nothing to do with my skin color or harassment but that I was breaking the law,” says Valentino, adding that when the school bell rang to start class, he walked away from the officer, who grabbed him by the arm.

Another officer arrived and the teen was handcuffed. “I kept saying, ‘Let me go, this isn’t why I come to school,’” says Valentino, who was then driven to a station. “The police threatened to press charges because I was ‘disrespectful,’” Valentino says. He also says that an officer asked what he had “thrown on the floor” before entering the station, an accusation the teen contests, given that he was handcuffed.

After six hours, Valentino was released and is currently suspended from school for nine days. Apache Junction Police Department spokesperson Rob McDaniel tells Yahoo Lifestyle that he cannot comment on juvenile investigations, and the records release office did not return a request for more information.

According to the Apache Junction Independent, Valentino was charged with disorderly conduct.

PHOTO: YOUTUBE/MY LIL WOODY
A student at Apache Junction High School in Arizona was filmed being arrested for wearing a bandana to school.

A spokesperson for the Apache Junction Unified School District also told Yahoo Lifestyle that due to privacy laws for students, it could not comment.

The Independent reported that principal Angela Chomokos sent a letter to parents Friday, a portion of which read, “The incident began when a student was instructed by an administrator to remove a bandana used as a headband. The refusal to respond to a reasonable request escalated to a point where some students were confusing the wearing of the bandana with defiance and disorderly behavior. This particular situation became escalated when students posted videos on social media sites.”

The letter continued, “At AJHS we do not condone the disorderly/defiant behavior and will take the necessary disciplinary and legal action to discourage it from happening.”However, on Monday, a group of Apache Junction students wore bandanas to school in support of Valentino, a gesture the teen says he appreciates. Parent Chris Say, whose two daughters attend the school, tells Yahoo Lifestyle that his children, along with others, were called to the principal’s office and, after a lecture, were allowed to resume classes.“I heard one student brought 14 extra bandanas to school so others could participate,” Say tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Valentino is known for being a sweet kid. He’s not a troublemaker.”

 

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KING: Black Indianapolis Man Shot By Cops After Calling Police to Report Robbery

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...cops-calling-report-robbery-article-1.2762748

Few cases typify everything that is wrong with gun rights, police brutality and racial profiling like this one.

Early Tuesday in Indianapolis, an African-American woman was being carjacked in front of her home in her working class neighborhood. She ran back in the house, told her husband, who is also black, and they called the police to report the robbery. That seemed to be the right and safe thing to do.

As the police pulled up, the husband, who was later identified as 48-year-old Carl Williams, opened the garage to their home and was immediately shot in the gut by police.

They claim they believed he was the robber and that because he had a firearm of his own, he was shot in self-defense. Officials identified the officer who shot Williams as nine-year veteran cop Christopher Mills.

He, of course, was not the robber. In fact, police have yet to even say if they caught the robber. Since they dusted the car for fingerprints, it appears that the actual man committing a crime got away and the man who wanted to protect his wife and family was instead shot and currently fighting for his own life in the hospital.

"I think that's really crazy. What do we have, trigger-happy police officers out here now?" asked Angela Parrot, who lives in the neighborhood told the Indy Star.


A man who had called 911 because an armed suspect stole his wife's car keys in front of the couple's east-side home was shot by police after he came out armed. (indystar.com)

Speaking to the Daily News, several reporters and neighbors all confirmed that the husband who was shot was black, but said that they do not yet know the ethnicity of the officer who shot him.

Whatever the case, the violent encounter should help illuminate the very real fears so many black families have when calling the police. This family needed help. They wanted to report a crime in their neighborhood. The husband wanted to protect his wife. These are all very basic rights we have, but day after day we see that gun rights don't really apply equally to African-Americans.

Merely reaching for his wallet got Philando Castile shot and killed in his own car. Having a gun in his pocket caused police to shoot Alton Sterling repeatedly in his back and chest.

Now this.

We do not yet know the extent of this man's injuries, but a bullet to the mid-section can wreak havoc. Yet again, without fully understanding the facts of what they were seeing, American police fired upon a man unjustly. It's just not right.

 

[AEA18]

That's why Black people don't want to deal with cops at all.

They see Black people and automatically assume we are a threat.

 

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[DCAllAfrican]

Sometimes in life, people need to get their jaws broken.
This is one of those times.

 

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Can 9-1-1 Protocols Protect Us From 'Barbecue Beckys'?
White people calling the police on people of color for simply existing isn't just annoying. It can be dangerous. Could the solution lie in how 9-1-1 workers dispatch calls?

A woman later identified as Jennifer Shulte became infamous in 2018 for calling the police to report a Black man grilling at an Oakland park. Shulte's frivolous, racist call is among many captured on video around the United States. Colorlines screenshot from widely distributed user video

https://www.colorlines.com/articles/can-9-1-1-protocols-protect-us-barbecue-beckys

As the internet has discovered Barbecue Becky and Permit Patty, public attention to White people calling the police to threaten people of color appears to be at an all-time high. News coverage, public shaming and solutions have focused on the caller, the police and the victim. But there is critical intermediary in these dramas who could help mitigate the harm of fraudulent, racist calls to the police: the workers who take the calls and those who then dispatch first responders.

The dispatch system sends responses to over 240 million 9-1-1 calls each year. Experts at the International Academy of Emergency Dispatch (IAED), a non-profit organization that studies and develops dispatch practices, believe that protocols that have worked to reduce bias in medical and fire situations can aid in policing, too.

There’s no national standard for the nearly 6,000 dispatch centers where over 100,000 workers field intake and communicate with first responders. Under IAED’s protocols, medical and fire operate with a customer service mentality where no judgments can be made about the validity of the caller’s claims.

But the principle that eliminates the opportunity for bias in those situations may have the opposite effect in policing. To prevent fraudulent calls to the police from ending badly, call takers would likely need more rather than less flexibility to assess for racial bias, and systems would need to be far more rigorous about analyzing the outcomes of all calls.

9-1-1 Standards Matter

Forty years ago, there was no standard for dispatching to any kind of emergency. Jeff Clawson, an emergency physician and first-responder, saw that lives could be saved with a system where every 9-1-1 call would receive unbiased, high quality medical care, even before ambulances arrived. He developed the first protocols which were tested in Salt Lake City, Utah. Over the next decade, as more and more dispatch centers adopted Clawson’s system, he established Priority Dispatch, the for-profit entity that markets, sells and implements the protocols, and IAED, the non-profit that studies, improves and offers accreditation for the agencies that use them.

As of 2017, IAED protocols are used in roughly half the call centers in the U.S., which house both call takers and dispatchers who are trained to do both. The guidelines are constantly evolving with feedback from experts, dispatchers, callers and data from 100 peer-reviewed studies. IAED acknowledges that some callers receive sub-par care due to implicit racial and ethnic bias in the healthcare system as a whole, which they believe is reduced using a customer-service approach.

Protocols are a set of practices, including for example, the way that all information will be solicited and passed on, with real consequences if they aren’t. They provide “a standard of care and practice that’s equivalent to what on-scene medical providers can do,” said Isabel Gardett, director of Academics, Research and Communications at IAED. Under such a standard, a call taker can talk people through life-saving pre-arrival steps from administering CPR to delivering a baby.

Such a requirement may have made a difference for Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old whom police shot to death two seconds after arriving to the Cleveland, Ohio, park where he was playing with a pellet gun. The officers were responding to a 9-1-1 call from another park goer. The caller told the dispatcher that the gun was probably fake and that Rice was likely a child, not an adult. Neither impression made it into the dispatch information sent to officers at the scene, who heard only of a Black male waving a gun. The dispatcher who failed to pass along this critical information was suspended without pay for eight days.

Twenty years after introducing the first medical protocols, IAEDdeveloped standards for fire and police dispatchers hoping to achieve the same success with the same approach: Create a system where individual bias is blocked by requiring dispatchers to adhere to a predetermined set of questions to get crucial information.

IAED wants every caller to receive identical treatment. If a call center uses IAED protocols, the dispatcher doesn’t determine whether a call is valid. The system doesn’t allow for what they call “freelancing,” meaning call takers going off script. For example, if a caller says “there’s a suspicious Black person in my neighborhood,” call takers cannot ask deeper questions to assess the caller’s motivation.

But Phillip Atiba Goff, founder and director of the Center for Policing Equity, a research and action think tank that works with police departments to craft fair and just policies and practices,argued that “prescriptive questioning” will not address implicit bias within the 9-1-1dispatch system, and may actually be harmful.

“What’s happening is you’ve got people with individual or private prejudices using public resources in the form of armed guards of the state to impose those private prejudices,” said Goff, who is Black. “I know for sure that the vast majority of law enforcement don’t think that that’s a good idea. It’s a waste of their time, and it’s not just dangerous. It’s potentially deadly.”

Police Reform

In December, at a Starbucks on the southern end of Salt Lake City, Lex Scott approached a 20-something Black man sitting with headphones on at a table covered with textbooks. Christmas music filled the air. Striking up a conversation, Scott recruited the man for the Black Lives Matter chapter she started last year.

In the early 2000s, Salt Lake City’s Black population rose about 50 percent but still hovers at just under 3 percent. Scott has been working alongside largely White Utah environmental and social justice activists to fight for policing changes throughout the state.

Two years ago, Utah Against Police Brutality, a community organization to which Scott belongs, demanded immediate changes following the 2016 officer-involved shooting of 17-year-old Somali refugee Abdullahi “Abdi” Mohamed after he struck a man with a broom handle. Mohamed survived but now uses a wheelchair.

“We started protesting the mayor and Salt Lake PD every week. Every week, we did sit-ins and call-in campaigns,” recounted Scott. “The mayor finally said, ‘Let’s hold the meeting.’”

Since then, a coalition of activists, including Scott, meet with city leadership such as the police chief and the district attorney to discuss pressing issues. While the twice-monthly meetings started out “combative” according to Scott, over time they’ve calmed down and the parties have made real headway.

“What has resulted is complete and total reform of Salt Lake PD,” Scott says. “We asked for live data tracking, which means we want to know the race, gender and age of every single person they’re pulling over and arresting. We wanted that posted on the website. It’s now on the website.”

Among the other policy changes: requiring de-escalation training for the department, a body camera policy and an online button for civilians to file complaints against police officers. Scott estimated that so far they’ve cleared about half of the demands off their list.

After videos began to surface last spring of White people around the country calling the police on Black people for doing everyday things, Scott and other activists asked for a meeting with 9-1-1 dispatch in Salt Lake. In late May, Lisa Burnette, director of Salt Lake City Dispatch Center (SLC911), attended one of the regular coalition meetings at the request of Police Chief Mike Brown. The meeting didn’t go as well as Scott hoped.

“The question I asked them over and over again is, ‘Who regulates 9-1-1 dispatch?’ They refused to answer,” Scott told me in frustration. “They said that they had to send police out to every call and I said, ‘Who told you, you had to?’ They couldn’t give me a law.”

There is no universal regulation of 9-1-1 dispatch. Each center creates its own policies in conjunction with associated emergency departments, subject to state laws. While some statewide 9-1-1 dispatch centers exist, most counties have their own. Different police department using a single center can have independent policies for handling call and reporting back.

Burnette, who is White and has been with SLC911 for nearly 27 years, said their center follows guidelines set by federal regulations as well as procedures set by SLCPD. In a phone call, Burnette said that she took Scott’s concerns seriously. As a result, she arranged for all employees at SLC911 to attend two diversity trainings. She said all future employees will also undergo diversity training.

A Day at the 9-1-1 Call Center

“9-1-1 dispatch, what’s the address of your emergency?”

Those words were pre-recorded by call-taker Lindsey Conrad. As a kid, she pretended to answer 9-1-1 calls with her mom while listening to police scanners at home, dreaming of becoming a dispatcher. When I visited her in West Valley City, Conrad, who is White, had been answering calls for almost six months at the Salt Lake Valley Emergency Communications Center (VECC). She spent three months shadowing and working alongside dispatchers and call takers before passing the exam to work on her own. VECC is also a Tri-ACE Certified center, where all three systems—fire, medical and police—use the IAED protocol.

The dispatch system works like a high-stakes version of telephone: The caller talks to the call taker, who then relays information to a police, fire or medical dispatcher, who in turn gives it to the first responders. The call pops up on the screen of the medical, fire or police dispatcher in the same center who watch in real time as the call taker enters new information. The call taker assigns the emergency a priority level, from 1 to 9 on a scale determined by each call center and the emergency departments. At VECC, like most call centers throughout the U.S., both call takers and dispatchers are predominantly White.

For two hours of her early evening shift in the basketball court-sized room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the valley between two mountain ranges, Conrad mostly fielded direct calls from insurance companies seeking case information and people looking for their towed vehicle, “secretarial” work for this time of day as she put it. Then there were rush-hour car collisions, accidental calls from kids who got their hands on a parent’s cell phone, one in-home fall and a concerned woman calling for the suicidal friend of her teenager.

Every few minutes Conrad furiously typed notes. As she checked boxes, new questions appeared on her screen. Once she collected the information, a script popped up. Most calls that weren’t transferred to Highway Patrol ended with, “If you have any more information or anything changes, please call us back, okay?”

Though Conrad has been on the job less than a year, she’s already fielded suspicious person calls where the only thing “suspicious” is the person’s race. But she says her job isn’t to judge what the caller is saying, it’s to collect the information and pass it along.

“I can’t place any judgment on anybody,” Conrad said sincerely. “I have to create a call no matter what. If a mentally ill person is calling in, and I can tell they’re mentally ill, I still don’t note that in the call. I still create the call as if it was really happening because you never know.”

Chris Burbank served on the Salt Lake City Police Department for 25 years, nine as chief. He is now the vice president of strategic partnerships, working with Goff at the Center for Policing Equity. During Burbank’s tenure at SLCPD, he advocated and implemented policies like a ban on jaywalking tickets which largely affected homeless people. Burbank, who is White, believes that there should be more nuance in police dispatch procedures.

“If we want to finally overcome racism, if we are willing to overcome bias it’s not going to be accomplished because we put in place rote procedures,” Burbank argued during a sit-down at a coffee shop in Salt Lake City’s Sugar House neighborhood. “It’s because we put in place the people who can not only discern that and make valid calls, but actually have the humanity to deal with the situation and understand.”

In a separate interview, Salt Lake City police officer Brett Tait agreed. Tait, a White self-described introvert who fell into policing 12 years ago, said she has experienced two different dispatch systems on the job—each for about six years. She said that protocols without discretion can be problematic.

“It puts [dispatchers] in, ‘This is the question I’m supposed to ask, and if you respond this way this is my next question.’ It takes out that human factor of asking, ‘Well, why are they suspicious?’” reflected Tait.

Tait has also seen departmental changes in the way officers are required to respond to calls. Previously, she felt officers were given leeway to determine whether or not a call warranted response.

But SLC911’s Burnette and Salt Lake City police detective Greg Wilkings, also White, told me that both of their systems have enough leeway to screen for racially biased calls.

“Salt Lake City 911 does not base a response based on race, we take calls based on behaviors,” Burnette told me during a joint call with Wilkings. “If the individual says the person’s suspicious because they’re Hispanic, then that’s not something suspicious.”

Police supervisors have the discretion to not send patrol officers out to a call that they don’t believe is valid, according to Wilkings. He said he tells the public that they should not call 9-1-1 if the only thing suspicious about a person is their race. “My message has always been ‘I don’t want you calling and telling me that there are Black, Brown, Asian. That’s not going to get a police response.”

BLM’s Scott pointed out that sometimes management policies don’t translate into field practice.

“They said ‘if someone calls us and they just say it’s a suspicious Black person in the neighborhood, then we’re not going to send people out to the call.’ Yet, we see police officers saying, ‘We got a call about a suspicious person,’” Scott said. “I don’t think they’re tracking it that well.”

In Burbank’s experience, it is public expectation, not just police or dispatcher bias, that should be addressed with policies and new practices. “We’re all geared towards ‘you call 9-1-1 and you get this level of service,”’ he said.

The Data Challenge

Alissa Wheeler, who oversees the Journal of Emergency Dispatch published by IAED suggested that people being racially harassed by 9-1-1 callers could use the 9-1-1 system to make sure the first responder has both sides of the story.“The idea is that the system itself for 9-1-1, at the point of dispatch, is not necessarily the one that should be triaging,” IAED’s Wheeler told me in a meeting at their headquarters in downtown Salt Lake City. “But an understanding of that infrastructure will empower all people.”

But a person would have to know that someone had called the police on them, and many Black communities are fearful of engaging with the system at all. For example, a 2011 Department of Justice study showed that Black callers were less likely to call for police assistance than White people.

“We often don’t call 9-1-1 because we understand that police will come and instead of arresting the person harassing us they will arrest or kill us,” says Scott.

Scott describes the 2014 shooting of 22-year-old Darrien Hunt, who was Black, after a someone called 9-1-1 because he was walking down the street in Saratoga Springs, Utah, which is 90 percent White. He was carrying a samurai sword used for Afro-ninja cosplay. Hunt was shot by police six times in the back and died on scene in front of a Panda Express restaurant. “I suggest that 9-1-1 better train their operators, that they make sure they have implicit bias training and that they are screening the phone calls from racists who are just calling to protect their own White fragility,” said Scott.

In response, Gardett said that IAED is open to flexibility in police protocol questions but would rather err on the side of caution because past research indicates that dispatcher bias in centers without standardization leads to negative outcomes for low-income and communities of color.“It’s quite possible that the prejudice would go in the other direction.”

IAED and other groups like the Center for Policing Equity have yet to conduct a racial analysis of the frequency and outcome of suspicious person calls. They don’t know if Black and Latinx folks are more likely to have 9-1-1 called on them as a suspicious person. Even if they pulled that data, they likely wouldn’t know the outcome of the call because data from 9-1-1 dispatch and the police aren’t usually linked. Most departments don’t require officers to update the dispatch system in addition to logging their internal police report. “We have been attempting to connect outcome studies for our police dispatch protocol for years and it is incredibly difficult and complex,” said Gardett, “Connecting the dispatch data with the responder data with what they found on the scene would certainly be a first step.”

Without national standards for 9-1-1 dispatch or law enforcement, collecting and analyzing the right data is a behemoth undertaking. Tracking both the source and outcome for “suspicious person” calls requires the examination of both municipal and law-enforcement data, and without a national repository for either, one would need to gather it department by department, Goff explained.

In 2014, Goff and Center for Policing Equity launched the National Justice Database, the first collection of nationwide data on police behavior and use of force that is meant to help police departments improve policy and practices. The National Justice Database could provide some key data in further investigating racially biased 9-1-1 calls.

Another option is offering dispatchers a broader range of responses to 9-1-1 calls. Departments in Camden, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Tucson, Arizona, have run pilot programs where they send social workers along with police.

“It’s always successful. It’s just expensive,” said Goff. When social workers go out with police, arrests and use of force is less likely. But departments incur the costs for two employees rather than one. In Salt Lake City that means paying almost $150 an hour versus $100.

IAED is in the early stages of exploring alternatives likecommunity policing and community paramedicine, a practice where an EMT or another health care professional responds to calls with a social worker or community police officer.

The challenge of effectively identifying and handling frivolous, racist calls for police is enormous and will likely require multiple interventions into the emergency ecosystem. Scott said the process should have started long ago. “When a Black person or person of color tells 9-1-1 this is not a new problem, we’re telling you it is a problem that White people think that you are there to protect their own comfort and to eliminate annoyances that they see in our Blackness,” said Scott. “Don’t say you don’t think it’s a problem. We’re telling you that safeguards need to be put in place that protect us.”

 

[hand2handking]

Missouri Restaurant Calls Cops After Waitress Gets Tired of Serving Black Man’s Birthday Party

Missouri restaurant calls cops after waitress gets tired of serving black man’s birthday party

A black Missouri man was humiliated during his birthday party after a waitress gave up on his group — and managers called police to escort them out.

Terrence Dickerson, a chef and recording artist, made reservations for 30 friends and relatives Saturday at Blue Sky Tower Grill in Richmond Heights, but he said the group was kicked out before the party was set to end, reported KTVI-TV.

“We wanted to have a good time and a birthday celebration, they treated us like we’re not supposed to be there,” dikkerson said. “It made us feel like a criminal. It made me feel like we were breaking the law, and we were not.”

Dickerson said he signed a contract reserving a party space at the restaurant, and he showed the TV station an email showing that guests could pay for their food and drinks on separate checks but would be each charged 20 percent gratuity.

However, Dickerson said the waitress refused to serve the group because she felt overwhelmed by the large party.

“She left and never came back,” he said. “The next message we get is the police want you to leave.”

Restaurant representatives declined to comment, but police said they were called at 8:20 p.m. for a report of a possible disturbance at the restaurant, and they sent seven or eight officers to investigate.

“We quickly found out that it was not a disturbance, just a misunderstanding over how the group would be billed, if it would be one check or an individual check. When we arrived, the restaurant came to an agreement and was working with the group,” said Chief Doug Schaeffler, of Richmond Heights police.

At least one of Dickerson’s guests recorded video of the incident that has been widely shared on social media.

Dickerson told the TV station that he believes the restaurant assumed he and his guests would not pay their bill because they are black, and he was embarrassed after they were forced to line up in single file and pay before they were escorted out.

“Very embarrassing,” said friend Hofton Nelson. “Police told everybody we had to go upstairs because it was a bad look on the place. I told him the fact that we have a black party of 30 and we have a contract to be up here, it looks bad because you have eight police officers here, and no laws are being broken.”

Dickerson would like an apology from the restaurant’s management, who repeatedly declined requests for comment.

“Saturday’s incident is sadly not a surprise,” said the St. Louis County NAACP in a statement. “As we look at the Missouri attorney general’s traffic stop data, it is simply a reflection of the reality of racial profiling in areas of St. Louis and across the state. The family underwent what many would call ‘dining while black.’”

 

[hand2handking]

'Dog Park Debbie' Calls the Police on Man Whose Puppy Mounted Her Dog: 'That's Inappropriate'

A woman called the police because a man’s dog humped hers in a park — and now she’s called Dog Park Debbie. (Screenshot: Franklin Baxley via Facebook)

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/dog...ounted-dog-thats-inappropriate-194558726.html

#DogParkDebbie called the police on a man because his dog humped hers — in a dog park.

According to Franklin Baxley, 42, a woman called 911 at the Attleboro Dog Park in Massachusetts Wednesday after one of his pit bulls greeted her dog by mounting him.

“I visit this park twice a day and all the dogs get excited when a new one is here,” Baxley, a former attorney, who is black, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “When the woman came in, my dog Dusse ran over and humped hers, so I immediately removed him and apologized, explaining that he’s a puppy.”

When Dusse did it two more times, both Baxley and the woman pulled him off. “She said, ‘I think you need to leave because your dog keeps doing that,'” Baxley tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I said I wasn’t leaving, and she took out her phone and called 911. It escalated quick.”

Baxley filmed the 911 call while the woman read his license plate number over the phone. Then a park employee (who did not return Yahoo Lifestyle’s request for comment) told Baxley, “That’s inappropriate for the dog park. I know it’s normal…”

“You cannot allow your dog to aggressively hump another dog,” said the employee.

Baxley tells Yahoo Lifestyle that after the woman got off the phone, her dog started humping Dusse. “She didn’t say anything,” he said.

In Baxley’s second video, he starts walking after his dogs, who are nearby the woman. “Get away from me, get away from me!” she said.

“I don’t have to go where you tell me to go, lady,” said Baxley.

Here is the one where she starts behaving as if she is threatened by me and is accusing me of following her around the park as I am following my dogs like any other dog owner. I was annoyed, so I began mocking her. Sorry, not sorry.

Posted by Franklin Baxley on Thursday, February 28, 2019

A police officer came into the park and Baxley told him, “She told me to leave the park because my dog assaulted her dog by humping him. That’s where we’re at, sir.”

“I asked you to leave because your dog was humping mine and those are the rules,” said the dog owner, then to the officer: “I don’t know why he’s doing this;” the cop responded, “I’m used to it.”

This woman wanted to impress upon me that she was superior,” he tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Her first instinct was to call the police when in conflict with a black person.” Baxley will continue his daily visits to the park where his dog loves to play. “This woman wanted to impress upon me that she was superior,” he tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Her first instinct was to call the police when in conflict with a black person.”

 

[hand2handking]

Policing Black Americans is a Long-Standing, and Ugly, American Tradition


An 1858 fugitive slave ad for Lavenia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...adition/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c13a223f5205

In recent years, news cycle after news cycle has focused on Americans, many of them white, who took it upon themselves to police their black neighbors. A white Yale graduate student called campus police officers to report a black student sleeping in a common room. A white golf course proprietor called the police on a group of black women because, apparently, playing a round too slowly is a crime. Twelve-year-old Reggie Fields was reported to the police for mowing a lawn. Stephanie Sebby-Strempel ultimately pleaded guilty to third-degree assault after harassing an African American teenager who dared to go swimming while black. And on Feb. 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood vigilante, killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla.

These incidents are not historically unusual. What’s new is the outcome, at least in some of the cases. For virtually the first time, white Americans have faced social disapproval for being caught on camera in the act of treating utterly normal behavior by black people as criminal. But people like “BBQ Becky” are not new. They continue a long tradition that began in slavery. From the 1600s to 1865, white Americans watched Africans and African Americans, checked to see if they fit the description of specific fugitives from slavery, stopped, questioned and seized them — and got rewards for doing so. The pattern established by white policing of African Americans’ movement during slavery is something that many remain all too eager to continue.

Together with three other historians, we’ve been helping to build a free and interactive database of all the fugitive slave ads from U.S. and colonial history. The ads reveal how white Americans trained and incentivized themselves to police black Americans’ movements.

Take a look at this ad for Lavenia, from a December 1858 newspaper. Her enslaver, D.G. Hughes, noted that Lavenia had run away back in May and may have been trying to return to Richmond. If Lavenia had family in Virginia, no wonder she was trying to return. Lavenia’s escape testifies to her resistance and perseverance, but her attempt to go where she wanted to go was by definition illegal. The point of the ad, which said she was “18 years old, black, rough skin, thick lips, good teeth” and “walks awkwardly,” was to get any person to read it to look closely at any African American adolescent or young woman. Perhaps they could be Lavenia, and you could get a $50 reward — a couple of months’ pay, for a working man — for catching her.

These ads were part of a system for policing Lavenia, one that stretched far back into the first days of slavery in Britain’s American colonies. Some of the earliest colonial laws about slavery protected white settlers who killed black people in the process of fugitive recapture. Nor could whites be charged if they killed enslaved Africans who resisted punishments that we would describe today as torture. In fact, less wealthy white colonists and other outsiders could wield power by helping to police enslaved Africans — defining themselves as part of the in-group by using violence against black people.

Other laws not only permitted but also required whites — called “inhabitants” of the colonies — to stop any “Negro” they saw to check for a pass from an enslaver. Without a pass, whites could assume that “suspects” were fugitives. Later, the U.S. Constitution would require states to return “persons held to service or labor” who escaped from one state to another. This agreement helped cement together the new nation. Even as the new Northern states ended slavery within their borders, they remained legally committed to surveilling, seizing and returning black fugitives. This, of course, made black life in those “free” states perilous and unstable.

Law and practice empowered white people to act as the police when it came to black people, including stopping, questioning and searching possible fugitives, which could mean any black person who vaguely fit the description. Many ads contained intimate details about bodies, including descriptions of whip scars, brands or birthmarks. These could only be checked by forcing people to remove their clothing. According to the law, those who resisted this kind of invasive violation had no right to live.

If every African American was a potential fugitive, every white American was a potential slave-catcher. In our own time, white people often rely on professionals to carry out the confrontation, interrogation, arrest, search and even killing of black people who seem “out of place.” But civilians drive the system, whether by calling armed police or taking the killing power of law enforcement into their own hands.

Lavenia probably did not think of herself as a “fugitive.” She was someone’s daughter. Like Trayvon Martin, she seemingly was just trying to go home. Meanwhile, George Zimmerman, as 911 tapes reveal, claimed that Martin seemed like a criminal — a fugitive — because he was walking through his father’s apartment complex. “These a------s they always get away,” Zimmerman told the operator. In the end, Zimmerman got away with it — he was acquitted on murder charges at trial, claiming self-defense. Today he still walks wherever he chooses. Only when those who insist on policing African Americans as if they are fugitive slaves face real and consistent punishment for their behavior will this country have any chance of addressing the way slavery continues to shape daily life.

Read more:

Sherrilyn Ifill: It’s time to face the facts: Racism is a national security issue

Cliff Albright: When black voters matter, progressives win

Max Boot: America will need years to clean up the toxins Trump has released

Colbert I. King: Trump’s rules of etiquette are straight out of the Jim Crow playbook

Michael Gerson: Vote against Trump’s politics of racial and ethnic hatred

 

[hand2handking]

 

[hand2handking]

'Walmart Wendy' Filmed Calling Police on City Worker She Claims Looks 'Illegal' and 'Creepy'

https://www.aol.com/article/news/20...she-claims-looks-illegal-and-creepy/23710303/

A woman in a Glendora, Calif. Walmart parking lot showed her true colors when she was filmed going on a racist rant while asking police to "come get" a man who she claims looked "illegal."

On Monday, a Southern California Edison contract worker asked the woman to move her car so he could park the company truck straight. Instead of complying with the request, she rang the police and asked them to come to Walmart and arrest the city worker. At one point in the video, she asks the police dispatcher, "Do you live here? Are you from Africa?"

The video, shared on Facebook by a friend of the contractor, has already been shared nearly 5,000 times.



After asking the man if he has a green card, a bystander in a car parked in the lot tried to inform the unidentified woman that the man is with workers of the electricity supply company nearby.

"I don't know this guy, he's videotaping me and he looks creepy from Mexico," the woman tells the dispatcher in the video. "He's speaking broken English."

The bystander calls the woman racist, to which she responds that her father is black and she can't be racist. She also adds that her little nephew is "Italian, Mexican and aloha."

Commenters on the Facebook post had plenty to say after dubbing the woman "Walmart Wendy."

"How does one look illegal?" one person asked. Another jokingly defended the woman by sharing, "Hey hey calm down everyone. She’s clearly not racist. Her nephew is aloha. For God’s sake!"

 

[Tony $now]

At this point it’s clear, racism is still very rampant in this country. They used to hide it, but now with the current administration they feel empowered. They know exactly what they are doing.

 

[nawghtyhare]

At this point it’s clear, racism is still very rampant in this country. They used to hide it, but now with the current administration they feel empowered. They know exactly what they are doing.

that's why we need to start whooping *** **** all that camera ****

 

[DCAllAfrican]

 

[Mark Antony]

Now that's just outrageous.

 

[Nouss]

Saw the service weapon then called the police...

C'mon man.

 

[hand2handking]