Santa Clara University campus police racially profile and harass black professor and her brother

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Tis_Bearself

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Santa Clara is “the Jesuit University in Silicon Valley” and is 2% black. This is ridiculous. Reminds me of the similar situation with a black professor who got locked out of his house back in the Obama era, only worse.
At least the Jesuit head of the University immediately apologized and took action (his apology is linked in the article).


The professor’s twitter with her own account of what happened is here:
https://twitter.com/mos_daf?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author
 
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I thought the campus security people were wrong, but the professor and her husband escalated at every opportunity.

But, I think they were appropriately angry.
 
Her tweets are very reasonable given the circumstances and given what we usually see coming out of college professors. I don’t see where she “escalated”. If it were my family member who was a classically trained musician, responsible citizen etc and he went to sit out on a campus where I work and was followed home by four police cars, I’d be angry, and I’m white. Her white husband was no doubt also upset because I doubt this is the first time he’s experienced bigotry towards his black wife (I hear about this from other white husbands of black wives).

I also know (since I have spent way too much time on and around college campuses) that people who “look like they belong” on whatever campus it is have all kinds of bad behavior ignored. This guy was targeted because he was a black man with dreads in a white area.
 
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Wasn’t the case under Obama needlessly escalated? It looked like he was breaking into a house so he was questioned and things got out of hand.
 
I actually agree with you that in the case of someone (anyone) breaking into a house, I would expect the police to stop and check that out. The guy then got upset with the police for (in my mind) doing their job.

However, the guy in question here doesn’t seem to have been doing anything but sitting on a campus doing a telework meeting on his device. Why would they conclude he was homeless from that?
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
Why would they conclude he was homeless from that?
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Maybe they have a problem with homeless people. I read about a case recently where a black woman sat on a church lawn across from a park which has a problem with homeless people. She was asked not to sit there by employees of the church because they don’t want homeless people congregating there. She got her phone out and made it a racial incident when it was simply of a matter of not sitting on their lawn.
 
I’m seeing nothing in any of the news stories or tweets about this suggesting that the man in question did anything to make this a racial incident. He complied with the cops right away because he is an educated man and did not want to get shot. Furthermore, the response by the head of the school pretty much confirms this indeed was a racial incident, and not a case of someone actually breaking any laws or campus rules.
 
StudentMI said:
Wasn’t the case under Obama needlessly escalated? It looked like he was breaking into a house so he was questioned and things got out of hand.
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Sure a man of retirement age walking with a cane. That fit’s the burglary profile in my book.
 
Generally, campus housing is awful at many campuses, and the campus security and staff treat you poorly. I’m a white man, and it has happened to me.

I remember being a grad student and having an apartment. I always used the chain lock. One day the door opens and the door is stopped only by the chain. I was resting and freaked out when this happened.

I finally get to the door and about 4 men (University staff) are their to clean my apartment. They thought I had moved out. I had turned in all my paper work to stay another year. I was pretty upset and yelled at them. They argued with me, but they eventually backed down.

Don’t stay in University housing if you can avoid it. Always use that chain on your door.

Part of the problem is that these things happen no matter your race. It’s University housing.
 
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I’ll defiintely agree with you that campus administration and campus police are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.

My experience with campus police departments is that they often take candidates who for whatever reason couldn’t make the grade to get hired as police officers elsewhere.
 
I went to college elsewhere, but can corroborate that campus police are not the best police out there. Some of them may have been rejected when applying to standard police departments. I think a big part of it is there is a definite divide socially between the officers and the students and staff they are supposed to patrol and protect. They don’t mix well. If they mix at all.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Santa Clara is “the Jesuit University in Silicon Valley” and is 2% black. This is ridiculous. Reminds me of the similar situation with a black professor who got locked out of his house back in the Obama era, only worse.
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Probably Henry Louis Gates, Harvard professor. Though he is also well known for some of the documentaries that he had done.

He arrived home on a trip from China to find that his door was jammed shut. With the help of his driver he got his door unjammed. A woman walking by called the police reporting an incident of breaking-and-entering.

When the police came out they asked him to step out of his home, saying they were investigating breaking and entering. According to the police report, Gates replied “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” He was asked to prove it was his home. He produced his Harvard ID and his driver’s license. While details of the event differ, the police arrested him for disorderly conduct, but charges were dropped after a negative public response.
src
 
I don’t think Gates is a good exemplar.

Or maybe he is. I put myself in his place. Cop looks at my drivers license, says thank you, Mr white guy, ha ha, you got locked out. I would say I’m tired, are we done. He’d say yes, and it would be over.

I don’t have a lifetime of interactions where I am assumed to be guilty, to be a ne’er do well. I don’t know how I would react if that was the case.
 
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PaulinVA said:
I don’t have a lifetime of interactions where I am assumed to be guilty, to be a ne’er do well. I don’t know how I would react if that was the case.
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I don’t know what Gate’s lifetime of experiences are. But there’s an effect that some have experienced when being repeatedly subjected to sometime that is annoying. With enough exposure, something that might otherwise be a mild annoyance or inconvenience for a singular experience can become an emotional trigger for a larger interaction.

I had a coworker that would repeatedly engage in a behaviour that I found annoying. The first few times I didn’t say anything; it isn’t unusual for someone to do something annoying every now and then. It is easy to ignore it. But when she was doing it every day I realized that it wouldn’t stop. I made some requests for her to not do it. But it didn’t stop. The behaviour continued and started to grate away at my nerves. My toleration for it eroded away. So I started to avoid her.

Outside of work someone that knew why I was avoiding her asked me why and I mentioned the annoying behaviour. They told me the behaviour was insignificant and that I was making a bid deal out of nothing. After a reorg, I ended up in another department. The person continued to engaged in the behaviour but now directed it at the person that had told me I was exaggerating. After enough exposure to it she started to share my feelings about it. While she was on the outside looking in, I just appeared to be unreasonable.
 
StudentMI said:
Cops doing their job making sure everything’s good leads to racial uproar. Come on, man.
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You ignore the obvious: No old fellow with a cane should get arrested for being a suspicious character on his own porch. Certainly ‘cops doing their job’ can avoid such things happening. There was not exactly ‘racial uproar’ about this either. Obama said the arrest was questionable and that people should be able to sit down and talk about what happened.

But that incident is over and done.
 
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No uproar? You must have been young when it happened. I remember it vividly, including the outrage over the incident. And then the details came forth about how uncooperative he was. Etc.
 
There was some uproar. It’s just been eclipsed by the 1000 incidents since that didn’t end with Obama inviting both parties to visit the White House and chat with him and each other.
 
There’s probably actual criminals committing crimes in that neighborhood and the cop is calling 4 or 5 other cops to all hassle one man who provided ID and is picking up trash.

SMH
 
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