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Comment by pilom | Hacker News Reader

Finally! This was one of the reasons I stopped actively using Nextdoor. My neighborhood in Denver is composed of a large group of elderly white people (who all seem to use Nextdoor somehow) and then a diverse group of people who have moved into this lower income neighborhood as the old people have passed away. The amount of profiling was painful. We had a black mentally handicapped man get picked up by the police because he asked a neighbor to borrow a ladder and she posted to nextdoor that she thought her house was getting cased to be robbed (and the police and Nextdoor have a partnership in our area). Hopefully this helps some.

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> black mentally handicapped man get picked up by the police because he asked a neighbor to borrow a ladder

I think there's a problem with the police, not Nextdoor, here. I mean, ok, somebody asked to check out suspicious person (and police, with their experience, should know how (non-)reliable such reports usually are) and they did. But picking the person up - which I understand means detaining the person - is decision that the police officer responding is making. No reporter can make such decision. And if this decision leads to innocent man borrowing a ladder being detained - this is not really reporter's fault, it's the police being unprofessional.

The reporter does carry some blame, for assuming that a black person is automatically suspicious.

From my perspective as a black man the problem is someone thinking a black man is suspicious for no reason other than that he's black.

You are making an assumption that there was no other reason. OP stated the man was mentally handicapped. Isn't it possible he was also acting strangely?

A reasonable assumption given that the OP didn't give any other reason. Are you assuming there was another reason?

We don't know anything about the reasons - we have only third-party information, which describes that some called the police on a mentally challenged person who had no ill intent, and that person also was black. Maybe racism added to the picture - quite possible, maybe not - it's impossible to tell from just this. It is a fact that there are many cases when black people are treated with prejudice, it is also a fact that there are many cases where mentally ill people are treated with prejudice, and it is also a fact that there are many cases where there are misunderstandings between people not caused by racism or anything like that. If you're a lone elderly woman and see somebody going about your property that you don't know and behaving weirdly, you might feel threatened, whether it's warranted or not. Surely, race may have played a role, but we don't have any real reason to conclude either way without knowing first-person accounts.

This one case is not meaningful; there is racism, it does cause black people to be harassed and worse, and that's a serious problem.

You're trying really hard to justify how this isn't racism. The poster lives there and knows these people, take it or leave it, your opinion isn't valuable.

Why did the poster mention "mentally handicapped"? Was that not an attempt to manipulate our perceptions too? Obviously playing on the notion that handicapped people are harmless, therefore it must have been race, but that too is a form of prejudice.

What he's saying is that we don't know. Innocent until proven guilty, maybe?

This isn't a courtroom, it's OP's anecdote. Stop concern trolling.

I'm not trying to justify anything. Saying "I don't know" is not justifying, it's admitting lack of information.

> your opinion isn't valuable.

Unlike yours, which is even though I obviously take the effort of not forming opinion before I have the information, while you seem to have formed opinion not only about the situation, but even about my motivations in discussing it, without any information to go on. If you think that makes your opinion more valuable, I think you are sadly mistaken.

We don't know. But, the likelihood of race playing a factor in this particular person feeling threatened in a very specific way, the casing of her house for its future burglary by a black individual, is a bit higher than her being spooked by the behavior of someone who possesses the ability to travel to, locate and borrow a ladder from someone with the aid of a computer.

Huh? The op explicitly stated that the african american gentleman was mentally handicap. I'm merely begging the question, could the home owners reaction be based on some strange behavior symptomatic of a mentally handicap individual?

It's possible, but it's much more likely that our society's embedded and implicit racism influenced her perception of the man.

Is that the only person she's sicked the cops on? Or one of many? Did she call the cops on other neighbors or did we only hear of the call involving the "retarded black man"? I mean... her notifying the cops of the other neighbor wouldn't have caused any issues if it was a white guy...

Was that racist? Maybe...

Maybe not...

The thing is: We don't know.

It's easy for armchair lawyers to pass judgement... but it becomes more difficult when you actually realize that one call isn't a pattern.

> because he asked a neighbor to borrow a ladder

By that I take it to mean that they were neighbors. So if your neighbor stops by to borrow a ladder, would you call the cops on him/her?

They may have had wildly different beliefs about their relationship, and there may be some critical details left out.

Imagine the case where you haven't met the neighbor before, you notice them before they knock and they look like they've been hanging around there, and it's really hard to figure out what they're trying to communicate.

Someone hearing about this might reasonably report it as "wow, calling the cops on a neighbor asking for a ladder", while you might see it as "weirdo I've never seen, who looked to be casing my place, and stammered out some BS excuse about wanting a ladder when I confronted him."

Because old white racist people are just exceptionally rare in the US.

If only there was a term to describe situation when specific individual's actions and qualities are ascribed based on general statistic for people sharing the same racial qualifiers.

Racing?

no I think even in that situation I still wouldn't call the cops. It still seems like an extreme and paranoid response to jump to "he's casing me, better call the cops" from someone wanting to borrow a ladder and not being able to give a reason.

I find it hard to believe that anyone goes about their daily lives with that level of paranoia towards every new person they meet. I think it's much more likely that it's because he's black. . . especially considering the background of negative race relations and stereotypes about black people and crime.

The point is, you don't know they legitimately wanted a ladder, certainly not from what the resident knew at the time. All they see is someone who seemed out of place and who may have exhibited the suspicious behavior I described above.

If you've never been in a neighborhood with high crime, or where scam artists have preyed on the naive, great, but don't act judgemental toward those who may have.

It's possible that he is an alien lizard using mental handicaps to conceal his lack of humanity.

But making an argument based on speculation is not usually helpful.

It is a problem, true. But suspicion never killed anybody. In worst case suspicion alone would lead to you thinking that person is an asshole. To take it to the level of mortal danger would require armed people acting in specific way on this suspicion, and that's not the reporter who's doing that.

The police work for the public. Am I responsible if I tell my employee to just go deal with someone and that someone gets roughed up? The first time? The 10th time?

They very clearly do not take orders from an ostensibly racist 70 year old. That's beside the point, because she wasn't giving orders; she was complaining about her neighbours on the internet, not to the cops. Lastly, it would be extremely surprising if she'd done the same thing twice, let alone ten times.

It's clear that she was in the wrong for being bitchy on social media, but how could she have predicted the outcome? In what sane world do the police seek out unfounded accusations on social media then act on them?

> how could she have predicted the outcome?

I don't think it's hard to predict that police will harass a black person in a white neighborhood if someone complains, and my guess is that it's not the first time it's happened in that particular neighborhood.

> In what sane world do the police seek out unfounded accusations on social media then act on them?

I would guess it's not the first time the police pulled a report from Nextdoor.

> In what sane world

I don't know, but if that's your premise, this particular world must be very confusing for you ... :)

> It is a problem, true. But suspicion never killed anybody.

A classic, recurring bug in the design of the human brain, one that gets triggered in me all the time, is that we naturally conceive of the whole world being like the tiny part that we experience; it takes serious effort to workaround that bug and walk in another person's shoes. Personally, I try to look for a specific signal: When I solve a problem - one I haven't experienced myself - by minimizing someone else's experience of it. e.g., 'That's not really a big deal.' Well, due to the bug referenced above it's not a big deal for me, but that attitude gets humanity in a lot of deep sh*t.

Thus, I'm not going to tell the GP that it's not a big deal; I don't have to live under constant suspicion every time I'm in public - though I imagine that would be awful. I do know that harassment of black people by law enforcement (and civilians), which often results from suspicion, is a very big and widespread problem. Look up 'driving while black', or 'stop and frisk'; you can read many, many stories of people being searched dozens of times, being humiliated such as being made to drop their pants on the street for a 'search', being assaulted ...

Think of it this way: Stop & frisk is a very widespread police tactic. So has it ever happened to you? Or to anyone know know? Even once? For most people reading this, the answer will indicate the bubble we live in. I'm pretty sure that if some attorney on Wall Street was stopped and frisked, or made to drop his pants, even once, the program would be over by the time he buckled them back up.

> To take it to the level of mortal danger

This isn't a realistic standard. Most serious problems in the world are not mortal danger, from assault to rape to being imprisoned, harassed, forced to eat in a different restaurant because of the color of your skin ...

> e.g., 'That's not really a big deal.'

I never said it's not a big deal. In fact, I said exactly the opposite of it: "It's a problem, true". Were you meaning to respond to somebody else?

> I'm pretty sure that if some attorney on Wall Street was stopped and frisked, or made to drop his pants, even once, the program would be over by the time he buckled them back up.

Unfortunately it's not as rosey as you describe - look up civil forfeiture and how many various people got hit by it and how this practice still persists though it is nothing but legalized highway robbery. Check out how easy is to get hit by something like "structuring", or google "three felonies a day" and follow the rabbit hole from there. But that would take us way offtopic. We know police in US has serious issues, both with race and with corruption. We know there are a lot of factors that make people of certain descents - such as African Americans - suffer more from these issues.

My point is not to deny any of that - quite the contrary. My point is that these issues are police issues, not the problem of whoever dared to call the police when they thought they were in danger. Even if they were mistaken on that part and there was no real danger.

It's a problem with everyone except the actual racists, right?

Quite the opposite - if the police detains a black person that did absolutely nothing wrong, while they would not detain a white person in the same situation - aren't they the actual racists that actually acted on their racism? Why is that so hard to blame a person who has absolutely no power in the situation except telling the police their opinion - and so hard to blame somebody that has all the power?

> We had a black mentally handicapped man get picked up by the police because he asked a neighbor to borrow a ladder

Also in other "reported by neighbor for walking around" stories of this sort: An Indian man visiting his son was reported as a 'suspicious black man walking around' – and was bodyslammed to the ground by a police officer for "not co-operating", which ended up leaving him partially paralyzed. The cop walked free. [1]

Maybe the police themselves should implement filters like Nextdoor.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/assault-charges-dr...

I'm imagining the post from a high up, non-white police chief saying he had been around police for years and hadn't noticed any problems. However he was truely shocked when they shot 19 black man to death one month.

I really have to say I was impressed. I live in South Carolina around about 10 neighborhoods using Nextdoor.

One of the neighborhood had a series of break ins to cars one night that got the entire neighborhood talking. Eventually, there was one older lady who chimed in that she'd seen 3 black teenagers in a pickup truck the day before. Somebody else chimed in that they were at her son's birthday party and then multiple other people in the neighborhood scolded her for jumping to a conclusion like like that (about as tactfully as they could).

That was 2 years ago and despite periodic crime reports from the surrounding neighborhoods we haven't heard another profiling peep. Considering where it seemed like things started I've been impressed to see the virtually immediate correction.

We have one older guy in our neighborhood who calls the cops on EVERYBODY. At some point it's just the person.

OMG Arvada is pretty bad too. We had some hispanic kids causing trouble in the park and people were trying to organize on NextDoor to go confront them with baseball bats. We're talking about 13 year olds here... It's definitely been used as a safehaven for paranoid old white people.

Here's Jeff Atwood's take on the subject: https://blog.codinghorror.com/can-software-make-you-less-rac...

I'm oddly glad that it's not just my neighborhood. Honestly, I liked living here a lot more before nextdoor. It's amazing how easy it is for people to say things to lower your opinion of them so dramatically.

Nextdoor should monetize their dataset. I could see some value in having a database of the irrational and racist people. It could be as simple as NextDoor selling access to a neighborhood you're considering buying in for a limited time. I suspect it might be really difficult to find a "good" neighborhood but some are certainly worse than others.

Police will regret that relationship. Xenophobic signalling on Nextdoor has surely resulted in a rapid rise in bogus resident calls. I know in our neighborhood it has.

Residents now constantly post photos of "suspicious" people and vehicles with responders telling them to phone the police.

> Police will regret that relationship. Xenophobic signalling on Nextdoor has surely resulted in a rapid rise in bogus resident calls. I know in our neighborhood it has.

It depends on the police. In many places the police have long practiced bogus harassment and arrest of black people (and other minorities), and this wouldn't change it.

The real role of police, in those places, is effectively to suppress people whom the political class in power find to be 'undesirable', not only criminals but homeless, political protestors, minorities, etc. In those places, the 'bogus' reports on Nextdoor are business as usual.

By the way, the political class in power (e.g., middle-class whites in some places) don't always consciously think about 'suppression'. They feel uncomfortable around the homeless person and unconsciously rationalize a reason to have them removed (he could attack someone, it interferes with local businesses, it's better for him to be in a shelter, etc.).

Are you sure that the political class in power is the one that supports the police? Or is it the one that instinctively assumes that all the police do is suppress minorities?

> Are you sure that the political class in power is the one that supports the police

Generally, that's always true. Whoever has the power writes the rules.

> instinctively assumes

> all police do

I don't feel like that tells me much, other than you are pissed off. I hope tomorrow is better.

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