Close. We’ve got a game of “ill-informed logical fallacy bingo” going.
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I must have missed that in the original story.
Anyway, it is great that you can scare scammers away from your house, but that won’t stop me from doing what I can to keep them away from my neighbors’ houses.
Meanwhile, this candidate has done a good job of displacing what was the big news story about her two weeks ago.
Emphasis on the “like”. NNO is part of Homeland Security. Grassroots neighborhood efforts would be even better.
That’s the usual reason someone calls (per the CNN and other stories) 911 and asks for the police – because it’s an emergency involving an immediate threat (e.g. burglars casing the neighbourhood). Quality-of-life and nuisance crimes like door-to-door salespeople are typically handled by calls to 311 or another non-emergency number, if not by the neighbours themselves.
Here’s a key excerpt from the 911 call:
“And the weird thing is, is that she just stops at the end of the driveway whether or not she talks to somebody,” the caller, [name redacted], tells the 911 dispatcher on July 3. “So, she like knocks on the door and then if somebody is there or not, she’ll stop at the end of the driveway and enters something into her phone. And I mean it takes a couple minutes per house.”
The dispatcher asks: “Is she a white female?”
“Uh, no,” [name redacted] replies. “She’s African American from what I can tell. Her hair is up in a bun.”
The dispatcher doesn’t come off very well either, leading her with questions about race. But what comes across is someone who’s about to go out of town for the holiday who is distressed that a black person is walking around her neighbourhood and has stopped at a grand total of seven houses (speaking to some of the residents of said houses). She doesn’t portray Bynum as a door-to-door scammer but as something more urgent.
Do you call 911 when one of these scammers plagues your neighbourhood? You strike me as having the good sense not to tie up an emergency line that way.
As I noted, I do my best to keep them out of my building by pestering them in a “friendly and interested way” until they leave (with a cheerful promise that I’ll keep an eye out for them if they return – strangely they never do).
Well, it’s not like Bynum engineered this incident as a distraction. But I can see why she might be more appreciative and gracious than she might otherwise have been to someone who called the police on her for “walking while black,” a phenomenon that’s increased in frequency since racist panic became something that the “president” excuses.
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Looking at houses isn’t illegal. Nor is it an emergency when someone looks at houses.
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You know I spent a good 20 minutes thinking Millie was herself saying “But you haven’t addressed a single specific thing I’ve said,” and being astonished that Melz and Millie were having it out.
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Or even better… you might know who your neighbors are and avoid making an ass of your self.
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Blue tarps. Heaters. Easier than pulling it off in points East, if you take my drift.¹
¹ Winter. Drift. Get it? I’ll see myself out.
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A while back I joined one of those “Local” social networks. I’ve noticed that since then I get a text alert every time a black person sets foot in my neighborhood. What’s up with that shit?
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In my town 911 is not the “emergency” line, it is the sole way to contact police. (I don’t know if that is the case where this person lives.) And while in the past I’ve spoken personally to people behaving suspiciously in my neighborhood, I would absolutely use 911 for this if I wasn’t feeling up to dealing with it personally. It is also the number I’ve used in the past to file police reports on things far less urgent than possible scamming or theft. Almost all police departments want you to phone them to report behavior you regard as suspicious. (Maybe they want this a little too much!)
Thanks for linking to the transcript, the whole thing (not just your excerpt) makes it sound like the caller was especially troubled by the fact that Bynum seemed to be avoiding occupied houses, exactly the point you were making about scammers. Honestly, she sounds basically just really young and a little unsure of herself.
(And good grief, did WW really need to doxx her? And maybe not make it sound suspicious that their calls to her “were not immediately returned”, given that she says in the transcript that her family is headed out on vacation? Oh, and real crooks now know that her house is empty. But at least WW got some clickbait out of it.)
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Your town is unusual, then. Most police departments and precincts in North America have a separate local number (usually they go to the desk sergeant) and prefer that non-emergency calls and tips go there or to 311 so 911 is free to take calls for medical emergencies, fires and serious crimes in progress.
Her county is typical in that regard. The non-emergency number is not 311 but it is a separate line to the sheriff designated as such. As an adult she should know better than to endanger lives in her community.
And yet she states clearly in the call that Bynum is entering things into her phone in the driveways whether or not there is someone home; that implies that she did indeed see Bynum encounter a resident inside at least one of the seven houses she observed Bynum visit without incident. After that she decided this was a police emergency instead of, y’know, going over to one of the occupied houses to ask one of these neighbours she cares so much about what was up.
No, the point I was making is not that scammers avoid occupied houses (I wish that were true as I’m sure you do). My point was that they avoid homes occupied by people they don’t read as easy marks. To assess them, they first have to ring the doorbell and size up whoever is at home.
So much for the old lady scared of scammers scenario. She may be young, but she’s still an adult who called 911 asking for the police. I’m willing to allow that she might have come to the (what you seem to agree is a ridiculous) conclusion that Bynum’s “behavior would appear a lot like someone casing houses for later robbery” after seeing someone dressed for a summer day acting like a real estate agent or surveyor or political canvasser or anyone else who goes door to door according to a set list that requires visit notes.
Allowing for that, the question emerges, what could have made this white suburban lady lose perspective so that the activity suddenly took on a sinister and, dare I say, dark cast? 'Tis a puzzlement…
I agree they could have done without naming her (I’ve redacted her name above so it doesn’t appear on BB). But beyond that the article providing the transcript isn’t clickbait (the kind of link no-one is thankful for).
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“This is what you are doing to defend the person who called 911 on their own State Representative:”
Well, a lot of our elected representitives are busy ruining America and probably should be behind bars (cf more than half of the US Senate and House).
As an american, i disagree with this only in as much as i think that there is more wrong with our police forces than the base level of wrongness in our society. The extra badness of police culture is grown from the problems in our society, however. So the disagreement isn’t large.
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Boggle. What kind of paranoid crazy juice are these people drinking? When I think about how many times per month people come knocking on our door in Toronto - from god botherers to grifters looking to make a few bucks mowing our overgrown lawn to salespeople trying to sign us up for this or that service - I’m flabbergasted that there are people in the world who regard any kind of door to door canvassing as worthy of calling the cops.
Also, every single door to door person (other than the grifters) carries some kind of uniform - an id tag and clipboard, a stack of religious tracts, “so-and-so for MP” buttons, etc. There’s really no mistaking any of them for anything other than what they are. A burglar might carry a clipboard and ID tag in order to blend in while casing houses, but there’s no fucking way any canvasser would “look suspicious” except to a paranoid and/or racist moron.
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I don’t see where you get this. To me it read like the dispatcher brought this up as a possibility and the caller just ignored it or went along with the notion.
C: No, I didn’t. So, My son said “hi” to her because he’s three and says “hi” to everybody. But then she like didn’t come to us but she’s gone to every other house that’s like…
D: When people aren’t home?
C: It looks like not home.
D: Okay, that’s what I’m saying. So, when people aren’t home she stops and goes to the… [interrupted]
C: Oh, I’m sorry. Yea. It looks like she spends more time at the end of the driveway for people who are not home. …
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Since when is pointing out facts of American society harassment?
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Structural racism?
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Anyone’s a potential criminal if you’re scared enough. What I wonder is why are these people so scared? Crime’s down 40-80% since I was a kid. Back then, we had Rodney King riots and waves of gang violence (and wannabes being violent to appear tough as a gangsta). Some fear in those conditions of racial tension might be, though wrongheaded, at least somewhat understandable. But nowadays it’s extremely calm and peaceful. What are these people so afraid of?
Nah. I hate door-to-door people too, but it’s not life-and-death emergency if someone wants to hand you pamphlet. Just don’t answer, let 'em leave their pamphlet stuck in the door, or hang it on the doorknob.
And almost all medical professionals want you to get routine preventive care and get problems examined early before they become more difficult to treat. But that doesn’t mean that emergency rooms love it if you show up and waste their staff’s time every time you think you might possibly have a fever, or have a bit of a cough, or maybe just a hangover.
I grew up in the south, one of the confederate states, and grew up believing that racism was a southern thing. It surprised me when I moved up north and there’s not much if any difference here. More surprising though was learning just how awful Oregon was.
It was founded by white people who gave up everything they’d ever known and were willing to risk dying from dysentery while traveling across the great wilderness all the way to the other side of the continent just to get as far away from black people as they possibly could. The state constitution even had a ‘no blacks or mulattoes allowed’ clause. I don’t remember that being mentioned while playing Oregon Trail as a kid. And I can’t imagine ever wanting to go there now that I do know about it.
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Well, the circular logic is at least self consistent. If the alarmed bigot can’t imagine herself having a black representative, then being a politician is no excuse for being out in public and knocking on doors. How did this woman’s world get so small, though? I’m certain she had help getting to this point…
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This. I had a rando old white dude walk into my garage while I was working with power tools. Turns out he’s the mayor of my town and was canvassing the neighborhood for re-election.
Talked to him a bit, and explained kindly how entering someone’s garage while they’re using power tools with ear protection on, may not be the safest thing for the person using said tools, or a person who startles them on their property.
He was a congenial old white guy, but can you imagine what would happen if Ms. Bynum had been casually entering people’s homes to talk to them (my garage has two doors, and only the smaller was open, which is why I was a bit surprised to see random person walking up to me…).
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Unicorn chaser. Seriously, you don’t see this often enough.
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