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Comment by krinchan | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, at least in the Southeastern US, NextDoor is more...RacistDoor.

I've seen people ask the best way to report black people to the cops so they'll be kept from driving through "our safe neighborhood." It's so full of dog whistles my neighbors dogs bark when I open the app.

The only reason NextDoor is freaking out is because they know there's enough of that sort of material to really cause a mass exodus if it ever escaped the neighborhoods it's posted in.

That said...it's...a weird issue, to be sure. NextDoor tried to encourage an expectation of privacy but like...who actually expects that? Really. Anyone with a credit card matching the address they key in can get in. It's not the post card only thing any more.

I could easily change my billing address on my credit card, sign up for some neighborhood on the west coast, and then change my CC address back. Done.

NextDoor has done nothing to actually secure the neighborhood, so it's not like it means anything to say this to the customers. If anything, the neighborhood members could possibly sue NextDoor for overstating the privacy of their posts.

I guess the conclusion is: I'm not just throwing my hands up and saying, "Oh well it's online no privacy!" I'm more saying this is probably the absolute worst hill to choose to fight that battle on.

View on HN

Wow, so many people all over the US with basically the same experience. For those interested in the history of this phenomenon, I strongly recommend the book "Sundown Towns":

https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...

My hazy understanding of American racism, which I now know to be wrong, was that it's always been getting better. Sure, slavery, but then the Civil War and an upward climb from there to the Civil Rights era and beyond. Except for the South, I thought.

It turns out the US had period after Reconstruction, know as the Nadir [1], when anti-black sentiment and action grew significantly. A wave of ethnic cleansing circa 1890-1920 led to a lot of all-white towns all over the country, ones where non-whites weren't allowed after dark. (Thus the title of the book.)

Chapter 11, "The Effect of Sundown Towns on Whites", talks a lot about how growing up in white-only areas leads white people to have enormously distorted perceptions of the dangers of black people. After reading that chapter, the RacistDoor phenomenon made a lot more sense to me.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=the...

This is a most excellent book about Reconstruction from firsthand accounts. This country would have been a far different place if the federal government had seen its responsibility through.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1886754.The_Trouble_They...

Also, Sundown Towns May have been at their most extreme in the South. But a look at Bay Area housing deeds from the 1940s will show that these neighborhoods were also explicitly seeking to keep non-whites out. Via explicit provisions that a house was not to be sold to or occupied by non-whites, unless they were the help.

Oh, perhaps I misspoke. The "sundown town" phenomenon was strongest outside the South. It happened all over the US.

It's hard to say if the civil war was even an upward climb. I've been reading a lot of Ta-Neshi Coates recently and he has opened my eyes. The civil war was started by the south in order to allow them to continue exploiting the labour of slaves. It seems those grievances haven't died.

Racism and, more importantly, white supremacy is an all-American concept which seems to be inextricably woven through the whole society.

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/537909/ - highly recommend this.

My hair is starting to think about peppering itself with white, so I wasn't born yesterday, but I've spent about 1/3 of my adult life in Asia (primarily Japan), about 1/3 in the North of the US split between Yankee-land and the Rocky Mountain region, and about 1/3 in "the South".

In the Rocky Mountain region that I was in (and that I was born in), there was no history of slavery or any sort of modern diversity (it was all coal-miners, oil-drillers, and ranchers all the time), so I think we can take that one off the table. As we can Japan - because their issues with racism are different from ours (in the US).

That leaves good old Yankee-land and "the South". I am by birth and by culture, not a Southerner, but I will declare that if anyone sees more racism in Shreveport LA (for example) than they do in Chicago or even Terre Haute IN, that is a person that I would assert has never been to the south. I believe generally (based on a whole lotta anecdotal observation - some of which are turning my aging locks white), that Y2K Yankee-land is far more racist than Y2K Dixie. I don't know what it was like in 1960 - the race riots of Detroit in '68 - white flight to the suburbs - any of that. But I do believe that you are giving your own region a pass and the south a diss if you believe that they are more racist than you.

EDIT: And it isn't necessarily germane to my parent comment, but I see a lot of use of the phrase "dog-whistle" with no specifics. Can we see more specifics, so that the lesser aware of us can know what you are even talking about, or even get educated on what constitutes a "dog-whistle"?

> But I do believe that you are giving your own region a pass and the south a diss if you believe that they are more racist than you.

This was definitely a lesson I learned. I grew up in the midwest, and because racism of the Jim Crow sort was more blatant in the south, I thought we were relatively innocent. But I no longer think that.

As an example, I got a reproduction of the Negro Motorist Green Book. [1] It was a good exercise trying to imagine planning one of the road trips I've been on, but only staying at the small number of places that would accept black people.

I also learned from that book that there was one town in Michigan where well-off black people went to vacation: Idlewild. [2] It was created because black people in Chicago and Detroit were excluded from other vacation spots. I grew up not far from this place and nobody ever mentioned the history to me. Not accidental, I'm sure, that white people forgot all about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idlewild,_Michigan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

"Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup."

Lingua Franca had an interesting example recently - http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2017/09/28/the-s...

“The man should be in a pub on the banks of the Liffey.”

On the subject of recent struggle for equality - I strongly recommend watching "the black power mixtape 1967-1975":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Power_Mixtape_1967...

I believe it's available on Netflix.

> And it isn't necessarily germane to my parent comment, but I see a lot of use of the phrase "dog-whistle" with no specifics

Quick, let's do some free association and tell me the first skin color that comes to mind: thugs, real americans, inner-city youth, hard-working american, welfare queen, illegal immigrant.

You are telling me that "welfare queen" is supposed to make me think of white trailer trash in my neighborhood? Surely not. You are trying to tell me that the phrase is supposed to make me think in racist terms, right?

If so, then, alright, the only thing on your list that makes me think of somebody that might be darker beige than me (I assume this is where you are trying to go?) is illegal immigrant, where I do assume "Mexican born national". Is that racist, or just a recognition of how our borders go and the fact that few Canadians come to the US to pick our tomatoes?

> You are trying to tell me that the phrase is supposed to make me think in racist terms, right?

No, "dog-whistle" terms seem mundane and can be played off as having the dictionary definition, but to certain people they have a very specific meaning. Your neighbor might say he wants to keep "thugs" out of your neighborhood, which you can naively infer to mean "violent criminals," but to other racists it's a synonym for "niggers." Or maybe you do know what he means, so you call him on it... and he asserts that it just means "violent criminals." That's what makes a dog-whistle.

Oh. I see what you mean.

I see enough references to the phrase (like: "everyone knows this is a dog-whistle for xyz") that I started to wonder if that phrase wasn't in itself, in certain contexts, a form of virtue-signaling itself. Maybe I was wrong.

Q: How is it that all the anti-racists know all the code-words that make up a dog whistle for racists? Isn't it supposed to be, by definition, unhearable?

I doubt we all know all of them. But they tend to persist for long periods, and so are easily discoverable by reverse engineering speeches. It helps that some people are quite explicit about it. Either in historical retrospect, as with the Atwater quote here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Evolution_.2...

Or with "saying the quiet parts loud", where people who aren't as good at dog whistling drift into being more explicit. Or people who are explicit get pushed into saying things where the racial connection is more easily denied. The Trump administration's Muslim ban is good example of that. They started out advocating for a ban with strong religious and racial components. When the public and the courts said no, they iterated to something less blatant. They will keep rinsing and repeating until something gets through.

I would guess that the answer is that not all anti-racists know all the code-words. Thug, urban, inner-city and so on are all known because they're the most used.

To contrast, I used to have a couple of friends who would use the term "friend" as a stand in for n* when talking about people in public. I figured it out from being around them and hearing how they stressed it differently than normal, but any random stranger wouldn't have picked up on it.

The same way we decode any phrase that has a coded meaning. I assume you can understand irony, jokes, and satire, dog whistle phrases are no different.

I left the country for a while, and when I got back, I was no good at picking those up either. But I do understand your point.(I think)

> You are trying to tell me that the phrase is supposed to make me think in racist terms, right?

No, I am saying the phrase is meant to be interpreted in a racial context by the target audience while passing off as non-racial. Non of the phrases I listed are racial by the dictionary definition.

The difference between a dog-whistle and a regular whistle is that dog-whistles are inaudible to humans and go unnoticed, hence the "dog-whistle" tag for such coded language.

It's not free association if you are telling me to think of a skin color while listing stereotypes.

Let's see...thugs=wall street(white). real Americans=cherokee(brown). hard-working american=Hispanic(brown). Welfare queen=goldman sacks(gold). Illegal immigrant=columbus(white).

Coates is unabashedly biased and not a great source.

Racism and, more importantly, white supremacy is an all-American concept

This is ridiculously narrow conception of slavery and racism. Slavery is neither "American" nor "white" - it's an insidious and evil institution that has been imposed on a wide number of people and races, even during the American/European slave period.

An even larger African slave trade existed in the Middle East and North Africa. Even the word "Slave" is derived from "Slav" - my people - who were enslaved by Spanish Muslims. In fact, slavery still exists and thrives in parts of Sudan and Benin today. Not the mention the massive amounts of slaves that existed in South East Asia or the fact that slavery was an established institution in the Americas much before Europeans came here.

There were more slaves in India than there were in the entire western-hemisphere. China had slavery as recently as 1949 (they didn't outlaw it until 1910) and was recently embroiled in a slave controversy in 2007! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_slave_scandal)

In fact, it's Western-European society that has largely been critical of slavery, as they were the first nations to outlaw it (Denmark and Britain), and have organized against Slavery while many countries around the world were still practicing slavery (see the 1926 Slavery Convention held by the League of Nations)

You have done an excellent job responding to a point almost entirely unrelated to the one you quoted.

He was talking about white supremacy, not slavery. And the phrase "all-American concept" does not mean that America invented it. He means that it's intrinsic, pervasive.

Which is pretty obviously true. America was white supremacist from the get-go. If not, we wouldn't have needed the 15th amendment, which came circa a century late. We wouldn't have needed 8 different civil rights acts (so far). The notion of whiteness is something America helped create and is continually redefining so as to help maintain white supremacy.

Thank you.

The other reply to you did a pretty good job of taking down your hand-wavy argument about slavery, so I want to pick up on your first sentence.

I'd urge you to reconsider the way you view sources and the media.

"Coates is unabashedly biased and not a great source."

This is a non-sequitur and a misdirection tactic commonly used by people who want to try and discredit arguments without actually achieving anything of the sort. Much like you've done.

"Bias" is not an issue. Legitimacy is. Can we trust Coates writing about race? The question really expands to, can we trust an erudite and eloquent black man with a lot of lived experience, to contextualize and write about that experience? I don't see why we shouldn't. I imagine both of us have much less to offer the debate than Coates, so why not trust Coates?

Or maybe America is actually far less racist than it was during the Civil War and opponents are magnifying what remains to try to make unjustifiable claims.

Can you cite any evidence or well-reasoned analysis to support this conjecture? The piece linked in the comment you replied to lays out a pretty rigorous case to the contrary.

So you want an entire rundown US history post-1865? If you want a social critique of the modern liberal "Euro-Critical" conception of racism and slavery, I'll refer you to Thomas Sowell's excellent collection of essays in "Black Rednecks and White Liberals"

Sure. Let's just agree on a definition of racism and how to measure it (hint: we won't).

And there's nothing rigorous about the piece linked.

Well, if you say so...

Or maybe anonymous people on the internet are throwing out entirely unevidenced possible explanations in a attempt to cloud the issue.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is extremely racist.

Are you seriously disputing that being free is better than being a slave or is that just hyperbole?

Be reminded that the 13th amendment didn't completely end slavery; it permitted it "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," and that more black men are restrained by the "criminal justice" system today in the US than were enslaved prior in 1850.

"and that more black men are restrained by the "criminal justice" system today in the US than were enslaved prior in 1850."

Worth noting that the U.S. population has grown significantly since 1850. I'd be more interested in the relative numbers (e.g. the percentage of black men incarcerated today v. the percentage enslaved before 1850).

It's true that rates of enslavement have decreased since the end of the Civil War. But it's disgusting that our common vernacular talks about an institution that ended over 150 years ago when in fact it is still very much alive and generating enormous profits for the people who choose to exploit it.

If you want straight-up hard numbers, I can't recommend any resource more then DrugWarFacts:

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/chapter/race_prison

No.

I hear about racist behavior in NextDoor Seattle as well. The Stranger (local alt weekly publication) has covered it at least once before, as have some other publications. From what I gather, the situation is a microcosm of what we see on a national scale: people who live in neighborhoods with low racial diversity are irrationally afraid of people of color, and NextDoor is their platform of choice. If you don't live in Capitol Hill or Pioneer Square (which face issues of rapid gentrification and homelessness), the local crime stats show that you are vanishingly unlikely to be facing even property crime. Now I really wonder what NextDoor looks like in my (predominantly black, including African immigrants) neighborhood...

I'm sure The Stranger will have a field day if anyone actually gets kicked off because of this "don't share with the media" position. And if NextDoor think that media folks aren't already embedded, in every neighborhood group, so they can have access to the kinda-racist goings-on of the platform, they are surely mistaken!

    > If you don't live in Capitol Hill or Pioneer Square (which face
    > issues of rapid gentrification and homelessness), the
    > local crime stats show that you are vanishingly
    > unlikely to be facing even property crime.

Do you really believe this? I live in Ballard, and the rate of property crime has been rapidly rising over the past five years. It's hard to get good statistics because little of it is reported because the police simply don't do anything about it.

In the past five years:

- The strap was cut and a gas can was stolen out of the back of my truck, a week after I got it.

- A chair was stolen from our front porch.

- My wife's car was broken into and her ancient iPod stolen.

- Someone climbed our fence and was wandering around in our backyard before a neighbor scared them off.

We would have certainly had lots of packages stolen too, but we simply don't ship things to our house unless we know we will be home. In addition to those direct crimes against us, we've experienced fun things like:

- Countless RVs illegally parked all around the neighborhood.

- People leaving literal piles of trash behind when they relocate their RV

- People dumping their sewage waste on the road when they relocate their RV.

- RVs catching on fire.

- Someone shitting on the street.

- Another person shitting in our alley.

- A neighbor found a gun in their bushes.

- Needles left on the ground in our yard. (We taught the kids not to touch them.)

- Screaming fights in the middle of the night.

- Homeless people using the port-o-potty painters placed in our front yard. (We put a lock on it after that.)

Seattle has a very serious homeless/drug addict problem and it affects virtually every neighborhood. None of this has anything to do with race, of course, but property crime and the other knock-on effects caused by a large homeless heroin/meth addict population are rampant.

We saw something similar to this sin the brexit referendum areas with very little little migration and who also benefited from EU subsidies vote for brexit because of the dog whistles of the leave campaign.

Don’t even get me started on NextDoor, Seattle, Capitol Hill, and homelessness. Also, don’t forget that a lot of people from the stranger and CHS are Capitol Hill residents and undoubtedly see this content just by virtue of being our neighbors!

(also, if you happen to be a Capitol Hill resident, please consider kicking in $10/month to help support the CHS blog, which just officially restarted today: https://www.patreon.com/jseattle)

>>If you don't live in Capitol Hill or Pioneer Square (which face issues of rapid gentrification and homelessness), the local crime stats show that you are vanishingly unlikely to be facing even property crime. Now I really wonder what NextDoor looks like in my (predominantly black, including African immigrants) neighborhood...

This makes it sound like we live in the same area (Rainier Valley). Property crime is definitely a thing here and gun crime has been consistent - though limited - in the Columbia City area.

Pioneer Square is also a different animal since it is highly commercial and not residential.

Regardless, the Rainier Valley has plenty of crime. I've had my car stolen, my car broken into, and a townhome next to mine being burgled in the few years I've been down here.

We are, of course, undergoing rapid gentrification as well.

I live in the heart of silicon valley in a very diverse neighborhood. Indian, Jewish, Persian, Chinese, white, Muslim, ...

I wouldn't call it racism, but it is other-ism, and it comes from all corners. This person doesn't look like he belongs in our neighborhood -- often it's more about social economic / class -- what vehicle they're driving, how they're dressed, are they a race that doesn't typically live in our mostly diverse neighborhood.

We have a lot of burglaries and it just drives up the paranoia.

The amount of property crime in at least some parts of SV is pretty ridiculous. My most recent bike was stolen within a month of buying it, to replace another bike that lasted 3 months before being stolen. That was bought to replace a total beater, torture to ride, flat tires, etc. Also stolen, though I can't imagine why. Next Door is also full of posts about broken car windows and stuff stolen from the back seats. So it's understandable that people get a bit antsy about people that they doubt are locals.

I haven't noticed overt racism on ND as much as crotchetiness, though. A lot of complaints about the local ice cream truck, for example, and about the number of camper vans parked along certain roads that people are using as housing.

Interesting, I've rode a bike during the six months I spent in Santa Clara & San Jose and never had it stolen.

However, I did notice that there were a lot of bike parking / bike racks that were awfully missdesigned/overengineered. There were racks that could be opened to put your bike in but many people did not know that so they locked their bike to the rack but when you opened the rack, you could simply slide the lock out. In many cases, the bike was only locked to the rack, which meant you could drive away with the bike without ever picking the lock.

I've made the same mistake for about two weeks, until I noticed that this retarded bike rack mechanism left my bike completely unprotected. Afterwards, I always checked other bikes and I frequently found others that you could just pick up and drive away with.

One of the best, if not the best, bike rack designs is this here: https://www.bikecitizens.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Good...

Very simple design, it can a whole lot of bikes and it's as secure as it can get.

Any idea why property crime is so high? Is it because SV is wealthy (on average) so more attractive for non-local thieves?

Most property crime is never solved because the police are stretched thin and they prioritize violent crime. San Jose is a very polarized city with wealthy, safe areas and some extremely sketchy unsafe areas where people get robbed at gunpoint at 2pm. The police have to focus on the crappy areas. One solution would be to split the city up so the residents are better served for their local needs.

My guess is that it's because there are very rich areas mixed in with relatively poorer areas, and they're easy to travel between. Also, bikes are in a sweet spot where they're valuable enough to make some money on, but not valuable enough for the police to spend any time on.

When asked that question to the SVPD, the response was, yes, "Because you have nice stuff!"

...also combined with a lot of easy pickings: people who don't always lock their windows, don't lock their gates, ...

or maybe police are under funded for the circumstances?

note I have no idea. just guessing at possibilities

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/police-offi...

>often it's more about social economic / class -- what vehicle they're driving, how they're dressed, are they a race that doesn't typically live in our mostly diverse neighborhood.

This. They hate "poor white trash" just as much.

My Indian friends are the most racist people I know. It’s all they talk and think about. That was one of the most surprising things to me coming from the South (where I did occasionally come across racists but they were usually excluded socially because of their views, unlike PoC Bay Area residents, who get a blank check to be racist).

This shouldn't be surprising because despite what you are told day-in-day-out by the media, Americans, and Western European society in general, are extremely progressive on race relations, especially compared to other societies around the world.

I find that interesting, because I live in South Texas and I don't really see any racist posts in my neighborhood. Mostly it's just people complaining about people's car alarms going off at night and reporting when package thefts occur. It's pretty low traffic, in general, honestly. I maybe look at it once a month and review all the prior threads for the month.

Same experience here, also in Texas. Nothing racist at all, just dog-got-out and other harmless posts of the like. Occasional political chatter, but not unreasonable.

I'm not sure why that deserves a "to be fair." I see blatant racism in my Nextdoor in DC too. There's a problem here, but it's not caused by reporters.

I see quite of it here in Portland, Oregon as well. Certianly more “those people” are a problem posts than I would expect. There is definitely a lot more ire directed at the homeless, but the (apparent) insularity of NextDoor appears to encourage people to show their true colors.

Time to start exposing them.

I live in Seattle, and I can tell you from the few times I've been on NextDoor, even in a blue city like ours, I was surprised at how racist people still are, albeit subtly.

It is mostly a story perpetuated in the press that racism is a Southern thing. Similar to how stories of dog fighting were the South. It is one part stereotype and one part comfort, comfort in the idea that where you live; outside of the South; possibly cannot have similar issues.

Tacoma here. I kept getting hand typed notes in my mailbox for a few months to join NextDoor. Looked it up once and never went back. Too many dogwhistle posts about "undesirable youth" causing all the city's problems.

Why don't you call it out? Like it seems that this stuff gets going because nobody ever raises their hand and says something, so the people who are left just get into a feedback loop.

> Why don't you call it out?

Because all that will do is create high school style drama about who's more correct.

But if you want to get into an eternal hate match between your neighbors full of passive aggressive backstabbing, there is no quicker way than to call them out on their causal racism.

This sounds exactly like the kind of app I hate. Do you think it was your neighbors who were giving you the notes?

> Do you think it was your neighbors who were giving you the notes?

Not my direct neighbors, but definitely someone a few streets over. I actually thought that their house was vacant until I received the letter.

There is far more racism in Seattle than southern cities and Midwestern cities that I've lived in. I perhaps have a different perspective on it since I am a POC, but that is certainly my feeling on it all.

Yeah, there's a lot of subtle racism. But there's also some pretty overt stuff. Look no further than our local conversations about homelessness and housing affordability, right?

No need to change any addresses either. Just pick up one of those visa or Amex gift cards. They let you put anything you’d like in the name and address fields when you’re completing a purchase.

I assume NextDoor is doing an AVS check and expecting a match.

The cards you mention fail AVS checks, but with a 'U' code for 'UNAVAILABLE'. Many online sellers will let those sales through. NextDoor likely does not.

You can see some of the possible AVS responses here: https://www.chasepaymentech.com/address_verification_service...

You can register some gift/prepaid cards online with the issuer, and enter an address. Then it can pass AVS checks.

Privacy.com gives you one-time cards that, I think, provide a positive response for any address.

I switched around a couple of times by changing the address on my Square Cash card

> To be fair, at least in the Southeastern US, NextDoor is more...RacistDoor.

Man, I guess I am not the only one who noticed this. And I live in Sacramento, CA. I am guessing its 10x worse else where.

I haven't experienced it, but I've heard the same of other neighborhoods in San Francisco.

It's not blatantly racist stuff.. It's random things like "hispanic male in hoodie walking around neighborhood, doesn't look like he belongs"...

The first few times you see it, you think, ok whatever, people are just being overly cautious. You might even think it was useful, and you could see yourself reporting such things.

But after like the 10th time you see postings like that, you really start to wonder if this is what racial profiling looks like in practice.

Just out of curiosity, how should a resident describe a person that doesn't look like they should be wandering around the neighborhood?

I mean, I know most people in my neighborhood and if I saw a random person walking around I'd certainly keep an eye on them. It's technically a public road so they have every right to be there, but it's a cul-de-sac and super uncommon for non-residents to be walking in our neighborhood so it 100% stands out, regardless of skin tone.

I understand your point. And in my post I mentioned that I could see myself making that type of posts. However, it comes down to how you describe the scenario and how your assessment was made.

There are lots of people on nextdoor who report things like "a black guy was walking down our street looking into parked cars, he ran away when I opened my door", or "I saw an asian guy digging in my neighbor's recycling bin, I reported him to the police", etc.....

I don't think there's anything wrong with that type of description. I find it very helpful.

I think if you or I were to report something to NextDoor, that's probably what we would do. We would carefully observe, report what we observe, and give reasons for why we think something's off. In fact, you did that in your post by mentioning your "cul-de-sac" and explaining your situation.

What makes me uncomfortable is when I see posts that make no effort to describe the problem, and just go straight to describing the suspect. That to me is an indicator of bias.

If they only report hispanics or other non-whites walking around as "not belonging", then yes, skin tone is playing a part.

If they only report strangers that don't match their own skin tone (but not strangers that match their skin tone), then I agree that it's quite likely racism.

I was just curious how someone would address the issue in the way least likely to be misinterpreted as racist really. I mean, if the only strangers that show up in the neighborhood are from a different group than you and you alert on all of them, can you really tell if the person is racist? You can't simple say "mind your own business" to those people. They are just being alert to things going on in their neighborhood, which is prudent. Perhaps they are a little over-zealous, but that's arguably better than letting your neighbor get robbed.

All of the above is assuming the person isn't actually racist. If they are then screw them, they should be ashamed of themselves and ostracization is a perfectly valid response to their behavior.

Maybe not pay attention at all unless something actually happens. You have no clue what that person is doing and it's not your business.

Nonsense, if you’re an engaged resident it is somewhat your business.

My family’s safety is more important than some rando’s feelings of acceptance and comfort.

I think domestication has taken the heightened situational awareness out of humans a little too much unfortunately. The fact that some people think it's wrong to be concerned about an abnormal presence near your domicile is disheartening.

I think it takes an encounter or two with dangerous people to be reminded of that. My luck with real sociopaths and whack jobs has been poor over the past few years and it’s really put things into perspective. Not everyone abides by the moral or ethical codes we take for granted in society.

Abnormal for you maybe. But you aren't always paying attention, that's not your job. Maybe it's someone going for a walk, maybe it's a neighbors friend. You just don't know.

So what are you going to do to someone walking through a neighborhood? Call the cops because someone is walking through a definitely public place?

If you witness an assault, yea go ahead.

Most people live in a tiny circle revolving around their place of living and their work-place. If we probably tracked every single human in a city, I would hypothesize that we'd find that a high-percentage of those that regularly "stray" out of those two areas in odd times, into places that are drastically different socio-economically than their own, are actually committing crimes.

It's quite unfortunate that we've gotten to a point whereby some rather nebulous terms such as "freedom of movement" ha gotten in the way of crime-prevention.

For all we know, keeping people from committing crimes by removing their ability to would actually keep them honest and force them to improve their lot. Unfortunately, it's an uncomfortable conversation that touches on police-state territory, so we probably won't have it in the public eye any time soon.

It's also quite unfortunate that you think that would solve anything. It's also quite unfortunate that you are only thinking of one type of crime in your assessment.

It's unfortunate that you don't even want to consider if it might solve anything. That's why we can't have nice things, and we're forced to live in a broken society with broken homes spanning generations.

Yes, thus is basically what I've heard described

The nicer the cars in the driveways the worse it is. The wealthier you are the more time you have to care about petty stuff.

It was kind of crazy how many times people on San Diego (of all places!) NextDoor would talk about how they "caught" a "hispanic male" looking in cars, or some other offense. This in a place where people with an appearance common to folks from Mexico and central America (note that "hispanic" isn't an appearance, but whatever) make up a huge percentage of the general population.

It is kind of crazy how often you can witness a person (of any color) walking down an alley in early AM hours in San Diego while looking in car windows with a light and checking door handles. I would give an unknown person one address number as not something to report, giving them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they live there. But then seeing them continue on to the next apartment carport, then the next, then the next...

I'm sure there are racist idiots posting false stories or such, but that issue you described IS very common. Talk to your region's SDPD Community Liaison about the types of crimes and their occurrence numbers. SDPD will usually be able to give you a good comment on the amount of calls about a certain crime vs the actual number of times they make an arrest for a certain crime.

Not saying that you’re right or wrong, but I’m pretty sure you can’t see the entire South-Eastern US from your Nextdoor login.

Are you speaking up when you see these examples of racism?

(Seriously with the downvotes?)

I have not noticed any racist stuff on nextdoor, I think the leads in the groups I have participated in would remove these kinds of messages and their participants.

I have been/am involved in three communities, all in the southeast: 1. An upper class neighborhood in a city where whites are a (slim) minority 2. A working class neighborhood in the same city where I seemed to be the only white guy 3. A rural neighborhood where almost everyone is white

I am surprised that people would write such things today, when the perils of doing so with your own name are widely understood.

The penalty for making publicly racist statements is decreasing, IMO; people are still being picked off at the leading edge when they really do go unambiguously too far, but there's an entire industry of thinly disguised racist news media.

oh you mean like this in the San Francisco Bay Area from two years ago

https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/racial-profiling-via-...

Yeah or these follow up responses by the company to the problem https://www.wired.com/2016/08/nextdoor-breaks-sacred-design-...

Yeah that is a lovely PR piece, and i watched nextdoor implement that "fix" wired was very generous with the breaking sacred design rule headline, the site wasn't exactly web 3.0 from the beginning and i think that was the point.

It's primary audience appears to be "homeowners" (owners from 1-50 years they do not seem to care) who might want to sell their home or are interested in service for their home.

So two years later and I personally still see the almost identical "those people" posts across all of San Francisco. A valiant effort but without serious moderation it is meaningless.

At a certain point mods in the nextdoor community need to either ban people completely which would cuts away at their fantasy ethos or shadow ban people which basically is the same result.

good fences make great neighbors

This is sad to hear but not suprising given my experience reading online local news comments. I live in Mount Airy Philly, a racially mixed and very liberal neighborhood. On my NextDoor racial descriptions usually have to be solicited. It seems that my neighbors are very sensitive to profiling, or at least to being perceived as someone who profiles and I've seen Caucasian members "check" other Caucasian members for leading down that path. That being said the "suspect" is often times AA, but the complaints are always legitimate so as a AA I'm rarely offended.

I love that you’ve been downvoted for expressing the “wrong” opinion. /s

Most “neighborhood” forums have a ton of racism. Try the City-Data forums for Baltimore, or DC Urban Moms. The threads about, say, the racial demographics of the elementary school in some genitrifting neighborhood can get pretty awful.

There's a simmering issue underlying this that in only a matter of time will surface in a court battle: if racist attitudes are common in the general population, does making a story out of it (presuming there is no related court filing about illegal discrimination or anything similar) violate a person's "non-notability" status?

I like the app for the classifieds, and event posts and updates directly from the city and police department. However there are a lot of older generation posters that complain about everything and anything. Lately in my neighborhood the older generation have been outraged about the new recycling bins and rules. How dare they expect us to sort our own garbage! Actually they are outraged about any change...

They need to own up to the fact it is community they have the power to manage. If they want to govern through censorship then they're going to bother a significant amount of people and turn off another portion who don't see them properly supporting and facilitating a safe online space.

Is racial profiling actually considered racism?

I thought it was its own category because it's not a form of prejudice, but instead refers to the use of race based statistical reasoning.

I'd rather we keep the line drawn. and not muddy the racist card.

e.g. RacialProfilistDoor is more apt

It’s true that making decisions based on statistical risk is different from people acting out of hate. Indeed, it can be seductive to people with a basic understandinge of math that data driven decisions should be more fair minded.

But the devil is in the details. It’s famously easy to make bad decisions based on “flawless” calculations that simply don’t interpret data right or don’t take all factors into consideration. Statistics is known for this peril even in mundane business situations, but with problems that are controversial, and affect people’s lives, it’s even more perilous.

Here basic profiling would tell me you are male, correct? Did you know people like you commit 99% of murder and violent crime? Can you really blame me for crossing to the other side of the street if I see you walking toward me at night?

> Here basic profiling would tell me you are male, correct? Did you know people like you commit 99% of murder and violent crime?

In case anyone was curious, the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics believes that men are responsible for ~90% of murders and ~80% of violent crime (in the US).

Thank you for the correction. I knew it was way up there but was just trying to recall off the top of my head.

I don’t think it’s a bad idea to profile men, especially based on whatever signals they’re sending via dress/appearance, gait, etc.

Cross the street! Safety is more important than a stranger’s feelings of acceptance and comfort. This is common sense.

Oh, all these people on NextDoor have carefully built validated statistical models based on clean, individually gathered data? Tell me more.

Because if not, this sounds like a fancy way to dress up racial prejudice.

Yes they do. And it's even hardware accelerated in the brain! Racial profiling is one word for a special case, but the general case is just refereed to as learning - e.g. using personal brain-stored data from the past to make future predictions.

That's mostly ridiculous. If the data they're using from their past is on past crime that they have experienced, that might be fine. But the data I can find shows that violent crime that white people experience is mostly by other white people. And regardless, most people don't experience enough crime to form statistically valid inferences about who criminals are.

And even if they did, it would be dumb statistics. If I am murdered, it's 80% likely it'll be by a white guy. But that doesn't mean I should just assume all the white guys I meet are probable murderers. It doesn't even mean that I should take precautions around white guys, however dangerous they are to me, because the odds of a given white dude being a murderer is still very low.

As studies and Nextdoor's experience show, people will racially profile strangers entirely in absence of actual experience. Indeed, as I mentioned elsewhere, people from all-white areas are much more likely to profile, and to do it in exaggerated, hysterical fashion, precisely because they have no real basis to form useful inferences about an entire race of people. Racial profiling is mostly just dressed-up tribalist nonsense. And it has been used in the US to kill thousands of black people [1], at least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot

>Oh, all these people on NextDoor have carefully built validated statistical models based on clean, individually gathered data?

Take a look at FBI crime statistics by race and gender sometime. Witnessing a Asian woman committing a property or violent crime is statistically speaking like winning the lottery. If I was to assess the risk of an Asian woman walking down the street I'd rate the risk as lower than any other demographic group, is that racist and sexist?

Oh, of course your name has "kek" in it.

If you treat people negatively because of their race, yes, that's racist.

So I can assume that you don't support affirmative action?

Why don't we just skip your half-assed white supremacist gotchas.

I'm Chinese. You seem to be a victim of your own prejudice.

I look forward to you proving that. My account's tied to my real identity, so step right up and do yours.

I don't give my personal information to mean spirited bigots. I certainly reject any suggestion I provide evidence of my race as that seems like a Nazi tactic and rather unamerican.

If you won't stand behind your words, I'm quite happy to share your view that they're not worth it.

Elderly people are probably just as scarce in some of those statistics.

Racial profiling is 100% prejudice -- pre-judgment based on race alone.

There isn't a universal definition of racism, but racial profiling is certainly a historical tool of racists and racist policies.

Being harassed for no reason except the color of your skin is equally harmful whether it's down to white-supremacist politics or cold statistics.

That seems to me to fall well within the umbra of "Discrimination or prejudice based on race."

http://www.wordnik.com/words/racism

Sure, but definitions aside, are we fine with it? I'm fine with it. I think there is a perfectly reasonable distinction between being cautious and wary of individuals based on statistical evidence (including race/gender/age/dress/demeanor), and treating them differently once you start interacting with them.

I.e. Every individual I talk to has a fresh, blank slate with me. Stereotypes and "profiling" only really apply until you start getting a concrete instance of said group, and deal with them in getting "fresh" data that is unique to them.

I wonder if they could lean into that and show people a different way. The last time this came up they had some tools for helping people recognize they were being racist and think about it.

“Our ML system has detected wrong think. Did you know you are being racist? Bad serf!”

I generally refer to this as the 'We reject being civilized' argument :-).

Civilization in this context being the set of rules and norms that impose restrictions on our behavior in exchange for a improvements in the quality of life for everyone in the community. One of the challenges of parenting is trying to explain to your children "why" they should follow the rules in terms they can understand and relate to.

I don't think any company should take on the role of parenting (presumably) grown ups, or worse yet children. I don't appreciate the idea that because an individual parent might teach their children morals and the social contract (nevermind the freedom individual parents have to raise their children according to their own subtle ethical codes) that it would be appropriate for large internet services to do the same for their users with machine learning.

It should remain with the people to argue with each other and change their views, not with black box magic woven into the communication medium.

Business are groups of people. They may collectively feel they can work together to advance society in a positive direction; not every business wants to be amoral and purely capitalist. As long as they’re not breaking the law, that seems to me to be a good thing.

To me it sounds like an old story; content host doesn't want the obligation to moderate & review the vast quantities of content posted to their site. If the content never makes it to reporters, nobody will be plastering their name on the front of the paper demanding NextDoor hire an army of content moderators.

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