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 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.
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.
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.
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.