Police protect coyotes from 911 callers, why not blacks?

An interesting photo came across my Facebook feed recently. It’s a photograph of a flier from the Monroe County Sheriff’s office in New York. Undated, it pictures a coyote walking down a neighborhood street.

The flier notes “Typically coyotes are nocturnal, but it is not uncommon to see them during the day. Merely seeing one is NOT reason to call 911.”

The flier goes on to list tongue-in-cheek reasons when it is acceptable to call 911 after spotting a coyote (they include “coyote carrying any product marked ‘ACME’” and “coyote on roller skates with rockets attached.”).

I searched online to try to find out when the flier was created and discovered that in recent years police departments in communities across the country have held forums and press conferences to plead with the public to stop calling 911 to report coyote sightings because it ties up limited emergency-services resources.

All I could think while reviewing this was: Why aren’t police departments taking similar steps to stop bias-motivated 911 calls against black people, and other people of color?

If you were on social media, watched the news or read the newspaper this summer, you couldn’t miss the deluge of stories about black people being called in to police as suspicious persons for simply living their daily lives.

They include men sitting in a coffee shop waiting for a meeting, a legislator door knocking in her district, a man moving into his apartment, a woman swimming at her neighborhood pool with her son, a group of women golfing, a college student who fell asleep while studying in her dorm’s common room, a young girl selling bottled water, a college student eating lunch in a break room and a family barbecuing in a community park.

Videos of these incidents went viral spawning monikers for the 911 callers like #BBQBecky #PoolPatrolPaula and #PermitPatty.

While the police cannot control who picks up the phone to dial 911, they do control department policies which should instruct dispatchers not to send them to questionable calls.

Just as dispatchers ask questions to determine the emergency services needed at a particular scene, they should also be gathering detailed information about so-called “suspicious persons” and assess whether an actual criminal activity is taking place or suspected.

If dispatchers are only receiving vague, minimal information from a complainant, they should have the authority to not dispatch an officer. When officers respond to bias-motivated calls, demanding identification and explanations from people going about their daily lives, they convert what was the racial bias of an individual into governmental discrimination and the consequences can be deadly.

A particularly egregious dispatch failure was a factor in the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Columbus, Ohio. Rice was shot dead by police on a playground while holding a toy gun. The dispatcher failed to relay to responding officers that the 911 caller reported the person in question was a minor and that the gun was “probably fake.”

Police efforts to address racial bias are just one small but important step in the movement for racial justice.

So what might a police flier to address this issue look like? Maybe it could say:

“There are hundreds of thousands of black people living in Kentucky. You may see them walking, taking their children to school, getting in their cars, going to work, taking a vacation. Merely seeing a black person is NOT a reason to call 911. Before you pick up the phone, ask yourself, ‘Is this person really suspicious or am I just afraid of black people?’”