3 ms·
>Police just assume that if you're out at night you are a criminal. No they don't. What they are doing is noticing things that are out of the ordinary. You do
by sureaboutthis 9y ago
>Police just assume that if you're out at night you are a criminal.
No they don't. What they are doing is noticing things that are out of the ordinary. You do the same thing. If everyone is wearing a suit, and one person is wearing shorts, watch all the heads turn. A black man walking through an all white neighborhood late at night will draw attention from any person in that neighborhood. The same is true if a white man was walking through an all black neighborhood. No different. The police would stop him, too.
I was going to work one morning and, as I got into my car, I noticed my wife's tomato plants had some red ones. Leaving my car door open, I walked to the garden to examine them to see if they could be picked. When I turned around, a policeman pulled up in a squad car. He recognized me but said he stopped because he saw a car with its door open making him wonder if it was a break-in. He then saw this poorly dressed guy wandering around the yard. Both out of the ordinary.
When he saw me, he laughed, and drove away.
I own a restaurant. One night, I got a call from the police that they noticed our back door was slightly open. That's different for two o'clock in the morning. They walked in and notice our cash drawer was missing. Patrol cars were dispatched through the neighborhood, a shopping district where there were lots of people walking around, when they found a guy walking with a metal box under his arm at two in the morning. How unusual.
- fyi1183 9y agoI believe you make a lot of good points, except for one: Walking as a white man through a black neighborhood, the police won't stop you. And even if they did, their attitude would be very different than if it was the other way around.
- sureaboutthis 9y agoI have read numerous stories and heard accounts of white people in black neighborhoods who were stopped because it is assumed they are only there to buy drugs. Why would a white person be in such a neighborhood? Sure, there are valid reasons, but it is generally still out of the ordinary.
- jetrink 9y agoThis is something that I have experienced. I'm white and I worked summers doing construction-related work. I was often questioned by police if they saw me sitting in my personal vehicle before work started in a black neighborhood.
- ergothus 9y agoSo your claim of equality is that a black man in a white neighborhood is assumed to be stealing from good (white) people, while a white man in a black neighborhood is assumed to be visiting drug dealers? This still seems like a problem to me. I agree with your above statement about cops reacting to what isn't "normal", but the problem is that normal and perception of normal are not the same.
- sureaboutthis 9y agoI said no such thing as you claim in your first sentence.
- creep 9y agoA black man in a white neighborhood is presumed up to no good, just as a white man in a black neighborhood is presumed up to no good.
- naasking 9y ago"Out of the ordinary" does not and should not immediately mean "suspicious". I think that's a difference that should not be forgotten.