| OneHungLo |
05-09-2019 12:38 PM |
Dumb Lib Chronicles: Was I Right to Call the Cops on a Black Man Breaking Into a Car?
What a world you dumb libs have created where people are questioning whether or not to call the cops on a black committing a crime...unbelievable
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Recently, I witnessed a young black male cut across my yard, duck between my neighbors’ two cars and try the doors of both, before “breaking” into the unlocked one. I opened my back door and yelled, “I see you getting into that car!” He took off running. I called the police and then posted to the (admittedly sometimes racially charged) Nextdoor app, in the hopes that my neighbors would check the locks on their cars and homes.
Break-ins are fairly common in my neighborhood, and this isn’t the first time that I’ve witnessed what appeared to be a theft and called the police. It was, however, the first time I was certain the suspicious person was a black man. I immediately felt a pang of guilt for calling the police and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, given the tragic way things too often end between police and people of color.
I feel an obligation to my family and my neighbors to report crimes. But I’d rather have my car broken into than have a person’s life ruined by my 911 call. And honestly, I don’t even know if it’s a crime to open someone’s unlocked vehicle.
If the incident had been a forced entry or violent in any way, I would feel less torn about having called the police. And really, people should know better than to leave their cars unlocked. I sincerely hope the young man wasn’t apprehended but instead was just scared off and won’t lurk around my home again. But what if he had been arrested? I also shudder to think how many young black men vaguely matching his description were harassed by officers after my call.
Did I do the right thing by calling the police? Or am I bordering here on behaving like BBQ Becky — the white woman in California who called the police on a group of black people having a barbecue? Name Withheld, Missouri
What you saw was a series of apparent attempts at theft — and entering a vehicle or a residence with the intent to steal typically constitutes burglary, whether the door is locked or not. Reporting such behavior is an act of civic responsibility. In your particular state, with its notably lax gun laws, people may not leave their wallets in their car but may well keep pistols in their glove compartments. In recent years, the theft of firearms, often from vehicles, has risen sharply where you live. Your state also has the highest rate of black homicide victims in the country (and most violent crimes are indeed intraracial). So yes, I’d say you did the right thing.
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Still, your anxiety that the police might overreact to your call is reasonable. In a 2015 survey conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, about half of African-Americans reported being treated badly by police officers because of their race. (Fewer than 5 percent of white Americans said this.) Unjust policing is wrong; it’s also self-undermining. One problem caused by the flagrant abuses of police authority we see reported in the media — the sort of events that generated the Black Lives Matter movement — is that they weaken community support for the police, and such support is essential to successful policing. It’s possible to understand why so many police officers appear to be willing to turn a blind eye to misconduct by their fellows (solidarity develops naturally among people who face danger together), but the abuse of police authority makes their jobs harder. They’d be better off if they did more to root it out.
That there are too many occasions when police officers abuse the rights of citizens does not mean that most police-civilian interactions go wrong. And the fact that being a black man makes it more likely that your interactions with the police will turn unpleasant doesn’t mean that interactions between police officers and black suspects are typically mishandled. Still, it’s bad enough that black men have a reason to worry that any arrest might go wrong. Your hesitance about involving law enforcement points to a larger crisis of trust, one undergirded by worrying racial disparities throughout the criminal-justice system. The best response, however, isn’t to turn a blind eye to property crimes. It’s to get involved in campaigns to reform policing and prosecution.
I recently put the condominium I lived in as a graduate student on the market. I moved out in 2007, not the best time to sell real estate. During all these years, the condo board allowed me to rent out my unit. When the condo hit the market, I received an offer on the first day. The offer was good: 95 percent of my asking price with a preapproved buyer. It was not perfect, as it involved an F.H.A. loan, a mortgage insured by the Federal Housing Administration, which requires buyers to jump through more hoops and thus tends to be more involved than a conventional loan. I was still ready to make a counteroffer, however, and would have gone forward if we could have reached a middle ground on some concerns I had.
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We never got to that stage, though. When I Googled the name of the prospective buyer, I learned that the person was charged with attempted sexual assault in 2016 while in college. The gist of the charge is that he kissed a fellow student against her will, refused to leave her room, attempted to touch her sexually and exposed himself to her. I am 99 percent sure this is the person who wants to buy my condo. The person has very unusual first, last and middle names, and someone with that name was arrested last year on charges of disorderly conduct in the city where I own the condo. I looked up the court calendar, and his trial for the attempted sexual assault was set for this spring.
In the abstract, I do believe that people who are charged with a crime should not be barred from purchasing real estate. But I also like the people who live in my building, and they have always been generous to me in letting me rent out my unit. There are quite a few single women living in the building who will find the same information I did when they Google this person’s name. I know they wouldn’t like having this person as a neighbor. At the end of the day, I didn’t want to sell my place to this man and decided to reject the offer, much to the chagrin of my real estate agent, who claimed I need only look at the terms of the offer and nothing else.
Was such a decision justified? Name Withheld, Chicago
Let’s suppose your identification was correct. People will complain that your making the decision before he was tried means that you were ignoring the presumption of innocence. But the presumption of innocence is a legal standard: The state shouldn’t punish someone unless it can prove he has done something beyond a reasonable doubt, and that isn’t established until a conviction is secured. We can make reasonable judgments as individuals, however, on the basis of the total evidence available to us.
So let’s ask what we’d think if you had been dealing with someone who had been convicted of the offense in question. There are various considerations here. The federal government, in 2016, warned that a blanket policy against providing housing to people with criminal records could violate the Fair Housing Act, because of its disparate impact on minority applicants. That’s presumably not the issue here. It’s also the case that most sex offenders, so far as we can tell, don’t reoffend; and there are good reasons to be wary of sex-offender registries, which arguably increase homelessness among former offenders without seeming to reduce recidivism. Still, the recidivism rate of sex offenders means that they pose a greater risk than do people taken at random.
Once again, a clash between values presents itself — in this case, between giving proper weight to sexual assault and giving proper weight to the welfare of the accused. There’s no algorithm for action here. But in siding with a community you were once a part of against the interests of a stranger, you did nothing wrong. You could make a case that you protected your building from the prospect of housing a convicted sex offender whose propensity to assault women was higher than that of the average person. The arrest on charges of disorderly conduct provides further reason for concern. I understand that you don’t want to be rendering a judgment on a fellow citizen, but you were perfectly entitled to have made the choice that you did.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/m...nto-a-car.html
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