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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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 ...
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.
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?
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 ... :)
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 actuallyacted 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.
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.
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?
I didn't know what nextdoor was (nor do I live where it exists) but I see what seems to be a fundamental error:
- They claim to have reduced "racist posts" by 75%.
- They say they accomplished this by asking extra questions whenever a racial descriptor was used.
In other words they simply made it harder to post when using a racial descriptor than not and claim this is a great reduction in racist posting. As a software developer I'm well aware of one thing: the more complicated I make a feature's interface be, the fewer people are going to use it. Without them having enabled the extra difficulty for all posting regardless of having used the racial descriptor or not, they're simply looking at people who don't post more using race not because they're racist but because they're placing an artificial hurdle associated with that.
Now, if they simply wanted for people not to describe race they should've simply removed it from the options; they seem to be so proud of effectively doing that but in a (thinly) veiled way, as I understand it they're saying that any posts that include race of the individual are racist.
Yes: the questions they're forcing people to answer when they mention race in a post are not empty roadblocks that simply add friction to posting, but are also meant to sharpen the poster's thinking process by forcing them to focus on aspects other than race.
That seems like a much more reasonable and even-handed approach than just simply saying race should never be mentioned.
I think they should go one step further. Instead of requiring two or more of a given list of descriptors if race was mentioned, just require three or more of the given list in the example image (with the age, build, and race questions added) no matter what. Then everyone gets to think about what makes someone suspicious. There may be biases related to how people dress, or what hair style they have or what age they are or even what their build is that can also be reduced by this method.
Singling out the race question as one that needs to be handled delicately is the wrong way to go, in my opinion.
This is misguided. Not every poster can provide a detailed description of the person they're posting about. Maybe they didn't get a good look at the person, maybe they have a bad visual memory, or various other reasons. Requiring multiple descriptors of the person for every post would cut out a bunch of legitimate reports, and for no good reason.
Your suggestion seems to be predicated on the assumption that reducing the number of reports in general is a good thing, but there's no reason to be making that assumption. Reducing racial profiling is a good thing, but that does not imply that reducing other posts is good.
When race is mentioned maybe present a slightly grainy image of a random person of that race with a statement saying this person had been reported previously "Is this the same person? Yes/No". If confirmed announce that it was a random image "racism confirmed".
Perhaps not, but it might be a significant component of it.
Think about it from the point of view of someone who doesn't interact with black people very often: they probably can't tell whether a person is a gangbanger or dangerous or not. If you can't distinguish a potentially dangerous black individual, then everyone black person becomes suspect, especially if you have a negative view of the group to begin with. People's natural risk aversion and fear of unfamiliarity just heightens this affect.
But presumably, that same person is more familiar with white people and can distinguish real threats, from, say, their neighbor or the kid down the block.
Nextdoor "suspicious activity" reports were notorious for racist reports that should never have been made. "Everyone be on the look out! I saw a black man walking around in our neighborhood, possibly looking for houses to rob."
If the UI helps people realize that a black man walking down the street is not suspicious activity and should not be reported as such, then it is doing its job effectively.
The obvious thing you are missing is that "There is a <insert ethnicity> man walking around the neighborhood." without any further identifying characteristics is completely useless information as to "crime and safety" and can lead to both false positives and race-based alarmism.
If you actually see a suspicious person round the neighborhood, helpful information will be to describe how they look in more complete detail, and what is it about their appearance or behavior that causes you to think they are a crime and safety concern.
I understand and it makes sense that saying "I saw a black person walking around" is effectively useless and likely racist. The problem I see here is that it's only applied to race. If the same person made the same report and simply not added race (I'm only going by what I see in the screenshots, no clue whether it's more complex than that) then we'd have a similarly useless post because it offers no quality information either way. I don't understand why they wouldn't ask for the extra 2 out of 4 details for all "vague" reports, only for race. It's good, valuable information.
edit: as I think further on it, I probably find more questionable the whole existence of a feature to report "suspicious activity" than Nextdoor singling race out. I mean, were I to go out in a skirt (I'm a hairy dude) would I be reported for whatever suspicious activity means? If a hippie-ish friend of mine with dreadlocks came over, would that be "suspicious"? The more I think on it the more it seems like a means of fueling people's paranoia/racism. I read that they tried to address that with the crime report feature but I still get the feeling that the whole thing is misplaced.
Nextdoor isn't especially unique compared to other social media platforms. What does appear unique is its traction among highly localized user groups (i.e. neighborhoods). Both myself and friends found Nextdoor actually extremely useful in the course of recent home purchases, to get to know the target neighborhood and seek inexpensive repair/contractor services.
Given Nextdoor's very localized character, there can be unwritten context to users' posts not always present in other platforms like FB. Eg. very easy to imply "I know where you live" in a way the intended recipient may grasp, but group moderators do not. As another commenter said, having users click through some questions before committing a hot-headed posts seems wise. It would mirror a face-to-face interaction, i.e. "Did you really mean what you said?"
No idea, tho, on the justification for Nextdoor's metrics for reducing abuse.
> Both myself and friends found Nextdoor actually extremely useful in the course of recent home purchases, to get to know the target neighborhood and seek inexpensive repair/contractor services.
Did y'all use it before or after purchasing a home? I ran into Nextdoor while searching for ways to research potential homes, but ran into a verification wall that I didn't feel like bypassing. Had I jumped that hurdle it seemed like it may have been a good way to get a feel for potential neighborhoods.
Used Nextdoor after home purchase, since I only was only comfortable using their snail mail postcard verification. Nextdoor does indeed treat their location verification more seriously that other services, although that likely is warranted give the possibility (and consequences) of abuse.
I had to quit Nextdoor. The same small cabal of loudmouths was overwhelming the forums with strong (yet uninformed) opinions, reflex hatred of anything signalling change, and a general seething that bordered on xenophobia. I expect some NIMBYism, but this was outrageously militant hatred of the future masquerading as quaint pride.
Nextdoor also seems to give people strange priorities for civic engagement. Winning an argument on Nextdoor doesn't change policy...speaking at Council/School Board meetings does, or better yet, running in an election.
Lots of people on our local Nextdoor seemed frustrated that the Council were voting contrary to some conclusion that was reached on the site. They failed to realize they needed to be making arguments where it mattered - at Council meetings, not online in some private forum.
Right, exactly! The one thing Nextdoor taught me is that people are truly just as awful as you could imagine. I have lived in nice neighborhoods -- as I imagine a fair amount of HN readers do -- and the blase of outright totally racist posts just... Well, it was just shocking, and I have to say that I'm not shocked by very many things. That some people know that they're posting to their physical neighbors and still saying the things they say... It's almost like they live on another planet altogether. Now, another very weird thing is that I've moved into a new neighborhood literally down the street from my old one, and I was equally shocked to learn that this particular neighborhood is totally reasonable, and I haven't even seen a single racist hate-post.
Nextdoor definitely exposed me to the racist, backwards reality of living among old, wealthy, scared, white people.
The thing that's worse about elections being won by idiots and racists is now you know that most people around you are idiots, racists, or happy to stand next to the racist idiots.
I must admit, every time I saw the phrase "close-knit communities" in that article I thought "curtain-twitching suburban Nazis". The problem the article was actually about suggests they'll be on an uphill battle with this one.
"But this was outrageously militant hatred of the future masquerading as quaint pride."
It seems that you have a problem with other people's opinions.
It might be you that has 'the problem' and not they.
'They' have a right to view their community and nation in the terms they see fit, whereas you don't seem to even ascribe them that right, moroever, you take a moral position on the issue.
'Diversity' does not mean different skin tone. It means differing opinions, attitudes and behaviours.
The people who scream 'tolerance' out loud are rarely tolerant.
Unless there is borderline hate speech - then I suggest that conversations between individuals should remain their own - not subject to controls by the government or private corporations.
Our company recently did a trial of looking for unconscious bias when we are making decisions, especially in terms of hiring practices. We all took a test to see if we had any unconscious bias toward gender and then discussed our results as a group. What really stuck with me is not that we have these sort of tendencies, but how shocked most people were at their own results. Most men in the room trended toward a bias toward men and women toward women. That shouldn't be that surprising really, but many were very disappointed in their results.
I've been thinking it would be good to do another round of that with the race test, especially considering how predominately white our workplace is. I don't believe everyone is actively trying to be racist or sexist (though some certainly are), but we might not realize that we're doing that on an unconscious level.
Implicit association tests have little predictive validity--that is, if we know that someone has more "unconscious bias" in an IAT, we should expect zero difference in their behavior.
I think many people posess a self-image that race is not a salient characteristic in their thoughts and they describe this as being "not racist". There is a premise in discussions about race that being racist (judging someone because of their race) and acting racist (treating someone differently based on their race) are two different things. We act not-racist to prove that we are not-racist in our brains. The accusation of racism can be rebutted by the argument that you can't read my mind.
The implicit bias test shows that either this brain-focused definition of racism is wrong, or we need to accept that we are more racist that we would like to admit.
Great studies. I always felt something was off about the IAT and couldn't tell exactly why. Maybe it primes us for racism/sexism/whatever it's testing?
Inside the German version there is a test for biases against Western or Eastern Germany. I knew that I had a bias, but I was surprised that I found it that difficult when moving a bunch of Eastern German cities to one group to associate negative things to the group with the Western German cities.
The test might not be totally fair, though. Is it actually a bias if it is based on facts? Soviet architecture, higher unemployment, high rate of extremism, lower buying power, less people, people moving to the West, the list goes on and on. I think stereotypes and preconceived notions are bad most of the time, but I see no reason to get rid of the ones that are actually true for political correctness.
The test is totally fair in a sense that it does detect bias. What you're actually saying is that the bias itself is fair.
Now, normally, it would depend on whether the facts that you're citing are true and relevant or not. I don't know enough to judge that.
But secondly, even if the group bias is fair, it's still problematic when you apply it to a specific person. They do not necessarily have to be representative of their group average, and you owe at least giving them a shot to demonstrate that.
> The test is totally fair in a sense that it does detect bias. What you're actually saying is that the bias itself is fair.
Sure, phrased that a bit wrong.
> But secondly, even if the group bias is fair, it's still problematic when you apply it to a specific person.
The test was just about associating cities with words, I do not think you can say anything about persons or specific persons alone from that information.
That is also true. But tests like these do make a point that many of the things that happen in our mind are not the things that we are aware of. I mean, if those people who passed the test were asked in advance whether they'd be grouping based on any particular trait, or even specifically asked about the trait they grouped by, I doubt that many of them would believe that it would work out the way it did. It's not a far stretch to assume that snap judgments of other people in course of day-to-day life can be similarly affected, and at least self-check against the possibility.
the test is fair if the goal of reducing racial bias is not to reduce crime but to achieve a more integrated society. in the long term, if such a policy contributes to a more integrated society, then more crime in the short term is deemed an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice. this is, in essence, the implication of such social pressure.
I like tests like these that can potentially point to internalized prejudices and biases. Knowing one's biases can cause pain and disappointment if we see that what we think of ourselves, and what we truly are, are two different things.
However, having taken one test (just now), I was left with the feeling that these tests may probably not be very accurate for everyone. When I tried it, I did it more from a memory point of view to associate the word and category. I didn't even think about the sequences and any implicit connections. Of course, my result came as "little or no bias", which I do agree with because I have thought about these for a long time and have been contemplating biases (and biased thoughts/decisions) that were not clearly obvious in the past. What I'm not sure of is the applicability of this methodology for all kinds of people.
This could work on HN too. A simple list of combinations of keywords (such as "Node.js" and "shit") detected in a comment submission could trigger a confirmation dialog: "Are you sure this is a meaningful contribution?"
It's interesting how different neighborhoods can be in the same city. In Seattle, my old neighborhood's board (First Hill) was vastly different than that of Ballard, to the point where I wasn't sure my friends who lived there were talking about the same site. The latter sounded like it was filled entirely with militant, yet simultaneously skittish NIMBYers, while mine was filled with park get-togethers and lost puppies. And since you could only see one neighborhood, the other experience was invisible to me.
I live in the Central District of Seattle and a friend, who made an account and lets me log in so I can read, lives in Wallingford. The differences are appalling. The CD has its share of minor crime but reports of suspicious activity are accompanied by descriptions beyond race or, sometimes, security camera output. This is mixed in with posts about giveaways, contractor recommendations, and Metro bus reroutes due to construction.
Meanwhile, my friend's account showed lots of posts like described here. Oh, and the slagging on the homeless was just vile. I have screenshots of several examples but I don't want Nextdoor to go all Erica Barnett on me and ban accounts so I leave them out. But the police department had a lot more "community forums" on the Wallingford part of Nextdoor than the CD's...
Side note, brilliant marketing. This is such a hot-button topic, that although I disagree fundamentally with their solution, it will definitely have a lot of people talking about it.
I wish he had gone into more details about what counts as a "racist post." He seems to imply that people were just saying "black dude walking around." But would "black man peering into parked cars" also be flagged? And do those extra barriers, existing solely because of the word "black", lower the reporting rate of those kinds of posts?
Yes, I was thinking this exact thing. They're making things better on one metric, but (possibly) making things worse on another. The article doesn't really address the issues of false positives.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a lot of people complaining about others with race-based assumptions in an online forum ends up reinforcing each others' biases.
If the additional questions actually do encourage a closer examination of people's thoughts then it might even be effective, at reducing the prevalence of racist opinions rather than only heading off the increase the platform could have been facilitating.
Reports don't get people killed. People (usually, police) shooting other people get people killed. Reporter has no control (unless they specifically and purposely misrepresent the situation, e.g. falsely reporting somebody firing a gun when they have none) over police actions. The police should bear the responsibility for the outcomes, not reporters or online platform or any other factor that did not actually make a decision to pull the trigger.
Are plane crashes are only caused by gravity, or is that engine that caught fire somehow related?
Please, don't be pedantic. Police make mistakes, and have their own biases, to boot. If you call them on some random non-white person in your neighborhood, and disaster ensues, you're partly culpable.
It's not pedantry. Gravity has no will and no choice, thus blaming gravity is useless. Police does have will and choice - it's not a law of nature that if you call the police they'll kill somebody, police is not a gun or any other mechanism that you just fire. These are people, who have free will, minds and responsibility for their actions. That's the whole point, only humans can take blame, and when their choices result in bad results, they should take blame for their choices, not redirect it to others.
> Police make mistakes, and have their own biases, to boot.
You say it as if it's some kind of excuse. It's funny that for reporter have biases is a culpable offense, but for the police it comes out as a defense instead. It doesn't work this way. In fact, random civilians have full right to be wrong, police are (or supposed to be) trained professionals that are paid to be better than civilians at this. So for them to behave worse than a random civilian should be a firing offense, not an excuse.
> If you call them on some random non-white person in your neighborhood, and disaster ensues, you're partly culpable.
Nope. The police function is to protect people. If they instead hurt innocent people, this is their fault, not somebody's that called on their direct and proper function. Their refusal to perform the function is their fault. Just as if you walk on the street and get mugged, you are not "partly culpable", because you could've walked on other street or stayed home - people who mugged you are fully culpable, because it was their choice to do it.
If you assign blame at the wrong place, they only result would be that people that need to change won't change, and you get more of the same problem. Which we are amply witnessing right now.
But the sad reality is whether it's a mistake or prejudice, police wield deadly force, so calling them always has the possibility of someone dying.
Should they be held to a higher standard? Yes. But many aren't, and until that happens, thinking otherwise is wishful or naive. If you call the police, and it spirals out of control, you DO bear some measure of responsibility. Not as much as the actual police, but it's not zero, either, especially if your call is racially motivated.
Mugging isn't a counterexample, because the mugger and the muggee have completely opposite desires in the situation. Nobody calls up a mugger and invites them to their neighborhood. Whereas, when you call the cops, you're somewhat in alignment.
Reports lead to those people getting killed. And the reporters absolutely should bear some responsibility when they report someone simply for being black in the wrong neighborhood.
Reports never killed anybody. You can't kill a person with a report. Police is not some mindless robots that are programmed to kill on a press of a button. They are humans, and they should bear full responsibility for their choices, not somebody who asked them to perform their direct function (for which they are paid from the same person's money, btw).
Their direct function is not to investigate suspicious instances of walking while black. It's to investigate actual things that lead to crime.
So, when someone does report a person as suspicious solely on account of race, and that leads to, say, a police shooting the person - the person that reported certainly shares part of the guilt.
And doubly so if, due to race-only description, police end up targeting the wrong person.
> Their direct function is not to investigate suspicious instances of walking while black.
True. Their direct function (one of) is investigating suspicious instances. Period. If the instance turns out to be just a black man walking by their business, they should say "sorry to bother you, sir" and both continue with their day.
This happened to me several times in various countries - police approached me, asked me some questions, ensured I am neither threat not in need of help and we parted ways amicably. The fact that a black person has smaller chance to such resolution than a white person who looks like me is a problem (both from moral and utilitarian standpoints), but it's not a problem of reporting, it is a problem of whoever taking decision on this resolution.
It's a simple thing - whoever is doing a wrong thing, is to blame for the wrong thing. Since when it became a problem to see things like this?
> when someone does report a person as suspicious solely on account of race
Obviously not the case in this discussion. In fact, I would submit it very rarely if ever happens "solely* on account of race. Even the most crazy, vitriolic, hateful anti-black racist does not report any random black person they meet to the police. They may hate them, they may scowl at them - but even these crazed bigots would know police will need something more. Now, there's no doubt that for many people race is a factor - sometimes a major one - but rarely it is the only one.
In the case under discussion, the person was on other's property, while not invited, behaving in unusual manner (not just passing by). Turns out the unusual manner was of innocent kind, probably complicated by mental issues, but again,
> and that leads to, say, a police shooting the person - the person that reported certainly shares part of the guilt.
Nope. Shooting an innocent person is not a reasonable response to a suspicion complaint. And blaming people for unreasonable and unlawful behavior of others is not right. If reasonable person can and should predict this behavior - i.e. if the police in this place is publicly known to be racist and trigger-happy - then the reporter may have some share of the guilt, but then again the first question that needs to be asked is how come everybody knows the police here is racist and trigger happy and it's still not fixed?
> And doubly so if, due to race-only description, police end up targeting the wrong person.
That did not happen in the case we are discussing - while we assume the person was treated as a threat even if he wasn't, there's no doubt and controversy that it was about the same person and there was no mistaken identity.
While race is not a good qualifier alone (too broad, of course), I don't see how removing it would reduce the chance of the police targeting the wrong person. After all, if the person of concern is of certain race, by pointing out the race you reduce the set of potential mistargeting victims to persons belonging to that race, and if you do not mention it at all, the potential set is all people - which is surely a larger set and thus possibility of mistargeting is larger. You can not reduce the probability of mistargeting by making your targeting selectivity worse.
Of course, you can claim race is not enough for identification - and that's certainly true. The police should be trained to solicit more details.
>> In fact, I would submit it very rarely if ever happens "solely* on account of race. Even the most crazy, vitriolic, hateful anti-black racist does not report any random black person they meet to the police.
And yet there are numerous stories involving exactly that. For example, people automatically assume that a black person in a yard of an expensive house is not the owner of that house (and from there, that they're up to no good - and call the police). Seriously, just ask around, and listen to what the affected people have to say. It's not a rare occurrence, and it comes from blacks of all walks of life, economic classes etc - the only common factor is race.
>> Shooting an innocent person is not a reasonable response to a suspicion complaint. And blaming people for unreasonable and unlawful behavior of others is not right.
I never said it's reasonable. And yet, by now, everyone in this country should be well aware that the police is behaving unreasonably in these circumstances - and you cannot ignore that when you ask them to come.
For those people who claim that they don't know - what, they didn't watch the news for the past several years? They have never heard of BLM?
> And yet, by now, everyone in this country should be well aware that the police is behaving unreasonably in these circumstances - and you cannot ignore that when you ask them to come.
So what I'm supposed to do if I feel unsafe when some stranger comes to my house? I can't call the police. I certainly can't defend myself personally - at least not in many places where personal firearms are either banned or severely restricted, and even showing them would be a crime unless there's already a mortal danger. What I am to do if I'm not in mortal danger yet but also don't want to be very soon?
Your solution seems to be for people to stop calling the police, at least until they have definite proof they are in very serious peril (by then it'd be too late, but at least the police would be able to confirm you were right - maybe postmortem, or maybe they'd be there still in time to take you to the hospital...)
My solution is to demand - right now, without waiting - from the police to introduce sane training in conflict resolution, threat evaluation and non-shoot-first responses, and stop shifting blame to the citizens and demand from them to sacrifice their safety because police can't be trusted to do its job.
What you should do before the police, is ask yourself whether the reason why you consider that stranger suspicious is because they're doing something suspicious - or just because they're black, and you don't expect a black person to be in your neighborhood, say. Just mentally substitute a strange white guy. If it suddenly stops being threatening, then don't call the police. If it doesn't, then go ahead and make that call.
All the other things that you say are orthogonal to that. By all means, do demand that police have sane training in conflict resolution, and are not generally trigger happy - it's a very worthwhile cause. But regardless of how soon you demand that, or how emphatically you do so, it won't happen tomorrow. Until then, you have to be aware of the limitations of the existing system, and interact with it accordingly.
BTW, I generally approve of firearm ownership as well as carrying for self-defense, but same thing applies there, even more so than with police. Though the laws in that regard are far more stringent, and the threat of being charged with brandishing for pulling a gun on an imaginary threat is usually a sufficient deterrent - unlike with cops, where the threat is some paid leave, and worst case, a grand jury that will not indict anyway.
Sure, ultimately the policeman with the gun firing his weapon is responsible, but if they're relying on a community report that says "I think he had a gun", they're going to enter the situation very, very warily. You can see how the report is a serious, contributing factor.
I wonder if it is an impossible goal to suppress all incidences of racist speech. Language is such a fluid thing, and euphemisms evolve rapidly to work around simplistic measures, such as the "clbuttic" obscenity filter.
The company decided to define it as descriptions of criminal behavior that don’t have sufficient description, i.e. “dark-skinned man broke into a car” or a detailed description of someone, including race, that fails to describe them doing something sufficiently criminal.
I.e. it is a description that mentions race and lacks either: a) specific criminal behavior or b) other non-race details.
In this case, no wonder that forcing people to provide these details reduces number of such posts - it's practically guaranteed by the very definition!
I also wonder about this:
Nextdoor is aware of “two instances of racial profiling that had slipped through its algorithms in the last few months.”
Nextdoor is a pretty large network. And they have quite a lot of people there, tens if not hundreds of thousands at least. And only two cases of profiling in several months, less then one case per month over whole network? It's either nextdoor users actually are nearly saints in this regard, at least compared to regular population, or they are humblebragging, or the problem itself is really minuscule, or they are blind to it.
I understand that it's racial bias to assume that someone is more likely to commit a crime given the color of their skin, but at the same time given that thats a reasonable assumption, I also think it's very reasonable to put your own safety above social progress.
I didn't even know Nextdoor was a thing until I saw this post. Where, once logged in, would I look to see random people being reported as suspicious by my neighbors?
Well, you can't get an account until you validate your postal address, then you only get access to posts from your neighborhood and adjoining neighborhoods.
Once you've signed up, if you install the app, you can configure push notifications about crimes in progress. You can also get emails for urgent things, if you prefer.
Whether this improves, or diminishes, security and quality of life relative to reading your local newspaper's coverage, is unclear to me. Even when it's not subtly racist or ageist profiling, I've never found the alerts to be actionable.
But the hyperlocal idea is at least an interesting one.
I wonder if they're just scanning for the word "black" or other races too.
Edit:
I answer my own question pretty quickly but it led to a second thought.
I'm curious if the reduction is just people not reporting things because there are more steps now.
"Others actually had their posts scanned for mentions of race (based on a list of hundreds of terms Nextdoor came up with)"
Edit: You edited your post. Your original comment I was replying to said something along the lines of "I wonder if they're just scanning for the word "black" or other races too."
Saying people in overwhelmingly white suburbs are racist is racist in and of itself. You shouldn't generalize people's behavior based on the color of one's skin!
Not in the case of the U.S., where around cities with significant black populations most overwhelmingly white suburbs were explicitly created as sundown towns, with the exclusion of minorities enforced by written agreement through "white homeowners associations." That's the entire origin of HOAs.
To say everyone in those suburbs is racist is overwhelmingly broad and unfair. To say that they are full of racism and xenophobia is simply accurate.
In many circles, racism and prejudice are considered different things.
When using this framework, one can be prejudiced against white people. But racism is about racial prejudice in the context of broad cultural and power structure imbalances.
By this definition, discussing caricatures of white subarbanites is indeed prejudice, but it's unlikely to meet the bar of racism.
This is a similar argument to why erasing "Black Lives Matter" and replacing it with "All Lives Matter" is seen as offensive, because it avoids acknowledgement of the relevant present and historical power imbalances.
That's a rather recent redefinition of "racism". Recent enough that most general dictionaries do not reflect it.
And one does have to wonder about the purpose of that redefinition, given that the old definition was more consistent, while still allowing to express nuances in the usual way, by adding qualifiers (so you could distinguish between "racism" and "systemic racism", for example).
So the only thing that the redefinitions seem to achieve is reducing the number of people to whom the social stigma that is (rightly) associated with racist behavior applies - by saying that something is not really racism, you implicitly claim that the stigma is not really applicable in this case.
Attributing somebody specific stereotypic behavior based solely on color of their skin (implying race) is the very definition of racist. Of course, if you talk about specific individual's behavior pointing it out is not racist. But if you say that individual is doing so because he belongs to a certain race and you would expect the same behavior from any representative of the same race because their race defines their behavior - yes, this would be textbook racism.
I was under the impression that 'leftist' (like SJW) is a derogatory term used for people who would likely call themselves 'liberals' or 'progressives'. Just like I've never seen someone unironically call themselves a 'fundamentalist'.
It doesn't detract from your point, but.. I've been around hundreds of people who use the term fundamentalist proudly as sort of an advertisement for their brand of christianity. They looked askance at other flavours of christianity, believing those to have drifted from the fundamentals of the religion.
What is interesting about it? The poster clearly doesn't care for leftists, much in the same way you likely don't care for conservatives.
Before you respond "But that's a false equivalency because leftists are good and conservatives are bad" I beg you to search yourself for a speck of self awareness.
Actually, a lot of research shows that our actions influence our thoughts. If you smile more, you'll be happier. If you are paid to recite a statement, you are more likely to believe it. Similarly, it is plausible that if you post less racist comments, you'll probably over time become less racist.
No it doesn't. A small amount of very flawed research did. If you smile more you may become happier. But this is because other people's reactions to you change if you smile or not. People being nice to you makes you happy, not your own smiling. Either way, how does that apply to racism? We've clearly seen that silencing racism does not make people less racist, it just makes them form little racist clubs to be racist in.
For one, I honestly don't care if you cease to be racist or not. I don't want that crap around my site. Go be racist somewhere else if you really feel the need to, but don't drive away my users with your poorly thought out crap.
Personally I think language plays a huge role in the dynamics of how people think and reason about the world. Why would any group want to ignore something so powerful? Because the "opposition" are not going to stop injecting their own ideas out of some sense of moral purity.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12369629 and marked it off-topic. The guidelines ask that we avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless saying something genuinely new about them.
The premise of this question is false. I object to the harassment of anyone, regardless of the color of their skin. Who would object to preventing the harassment of people with black skin, and why?
There's a massive and historic problem of black-skinned people being harassed (and much worse) by police and civilians. The evidence is overwhelming. Therefore, we need to put great effort into solving it.
The idea that there is a competition between races is not only absurd but well-established to be highly damaging; the results are very bad for everyone. Stopping the harassment of black-skinned people helps everyone. If there's a competition, it's the hateful vs. the great majority who are civilized, regardless of skin color (or religion or sexual preference or country of origin or anything else). I'm on the side of the civilized. If we built a wall to keep out the hateful, think how many problems would simply disappear.
White people were not slaves, were not subject to segregation and its cousin redlining; were not and are not suffering widespread exclusion from education, finance, housing, healthcare, government, employment, and most other aspects of society; were not lynched; are not subject to harassment, assault and imprisonment by law enforcement due to their skin color (of which there is overwhelming evidence).
Look at a photo of the US Senate, or almost any state or local government; a photo of Fortune 500 CEOs or people who work in SV or Wall Street, or elite university faculty and administration: If you meet a police officer, note their skin color, and that of the DA, the judge, the appeals court judge, the legislators who write the laws that they all enforce. You can see who understands, protects and furthers the interests of white-skinned people when they are threatened.
Also, despite your implication, I said that I oppose the harassment of everyone, which of course includes any group you name.
Slavery was a commonplace practice all around the world for up until about 200 years ago. White Greeks were slaves. The Arab/Ottoman slave trades (made mostly of white captives) flourished during the 16-and-1700s.
