The Racialization of Public Safety and White Women’s Policing of Black Bodies
On a cool October evening, inside a Brooklyn market deli in 2018, nine-year-old Jeremiah Harvey shopped with his mother and sister. Alongside them, Teresa Klein, an older white woman, did the same. On his way outside the deli, Jeremiah's backpack lightly grazed Teresa's back as she leaned over the store's counter. The child, not realizing what had happened, went about his way. But Teresa saw this unintentional touching as the gravest wrongdoing and accosted the family of three outside the deli.
Teresa loudly accused nine-year-old Jeremiah of groping her and harshly threatened to call the cops. She then made a show of dialing 911 and was heard saying to someone on the other side of her phone, "the son grabbed my ass, and the mom decided to yell at me. I was just sexually assaulted by a child." As Harvey and his younger sister stood by their mother's side outside the deli, wailing and crying, vehemently denying these claims, Teresa continued her spectacle of threatening the young child with the cops.
Video surveillance would later prove that Jeremiah never touched Teresa. Jeremiah was proven innocent. He was lucky, this time. Most black men in America, however, are not this fortunate. Emmet Till wasn't.
The phenomenon of white women calling the cops on Black people has become so common in the United States that in 2018 new laws were introduced to combat these injustices. Eight states and jurisdictions— San Francisco, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, California, Los Angeles, and Minnesota— wrote laws that sought to criminalize false 9-1-1 calls based on race or protected class. But even with these criminal laws in place, it's no surprise to Black people that not one white woman has been held accountable.
"White women don't get in trouble for falsely reporting a crime based on race because it is considered reasonable," explains Professor Justin Mann, author of "What's Your Emergency: White Women and the Policing of Public Space." He believes uninterrogated racism and the racialization of public safety are why white women are not held accountable. Racialization, for those unfamiliar, is the process of making something that's supposed to be for everyone, such as a public park, into a space that's laden with racial tension.
White women, Mann says, are protected and shielded by the discourse of Black criminality and the ideology of white supremacy and white heteropatriarchy.
Heteropatriarchy is the system by which white men uphold the values of white supremacy and patriarchy. Unfortunately, some white women feel that they are protected by this system, and as a result they feel justified in calling the police on innocent Black people, because they believe they would not have to face the consequences.
When white women do call the police wrongly, there's often a rallying cry of support behind them. Mann explained that the support behind these women comes from many of their supporter's uninterrogated racism. Mann says many white people look at these scenarios and say, '"Yeah, these women behaved reasonably. They didn't recognize a person in their neighborhood, so they did what anyone would do. They called the police."'
Many people, in the aftermath of a viral event in which a white woman calls the police on a Black person, demand proof of the incident before they are able to humanize the Black victim. "Pictures, or it didn't happen," is a fun, catchy internet slang that gets flipped on its head in these moments, to demand Black people provide proof of wrongdoings done to them by racists.
Many times, unfortunately, there are no videos to show "proof." And when there is a video, what often happens is the Black person is still blamed and endlessly questioned. A sample of the comments section on any news article detailing the story of a Black person wrongly accused might read as such: "Are you sure it was really racism, though?" "Did you misinterpret this?" "Why didn't you just comply?" Then the excuses, speculation, and humiliation begin. "They didn't mean it that way." "I'm sure they weren't racist." "Stop making everything about race." This is the system of Black criminality and uninterrogated racism.
Many white women who call the police on innocent Black people, and the white people who support them, feel protected, in particular, by the fourth amendment, which grants citizens "the right...to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." A white woman who calls the cops on a Black person she may not recognize in her neighborhood, feels that her personhood and her property is being violated. In reality, when the police arrive and interrogate and arrest the innocent Black person, it is that Black person's personhood which is being violated. According to Devon W. Carbado, a professor of law and African American studies at UCLA, who analyzed police violence against African Americans, police and civilians alike widely use the fourth amendment to profile and criminalize Black people racially.
Professor Justin Mann says the concept of white people using the police as their personal protection force and racializing public safety heightened in 1972 when Richard Nixon was running for president. Nixon made crime, law, and order a 'hot-button issue' and capitalized on the fears of white Americans who worried about the spill of racialized violence from the city to the suburbs. According to Mann, Nixon reinforced the idea that, "the home is supposed to be a safe space, and the police are meant to keep that space safe; Black people commit crimes against white people, and that the police is an institution that intervenes when I call them because my property is threatened."
Often times, companies and corporations play a role in upholding the white supremacy inherent in white women calling the police on Black people. On an April afternoon in 2018, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, two Black men, walked into a Philadelphia Starbucks intending to have a real estate business meeting with a friend. They found a table to wait for the arrival of their friend, and immediately, Rashon walked up to the cashier and asked to use the restroom. The cashier--a white woman--told him that the restrooms were for customers only, and that he, Rashon, would have to buy something. Without arguing, Rashon walked back to the table where Donte sat, and they started having a conversation. The cashier approached their table not a moment later, inquiring if they needed to buy anything. The men told the cashier they didn't need anything at that moment and were waiting for a friend. "We will be out of here shortly," they told her. The cashier left, and shortly thereafter, two police officers walked into the store. Rashon and Donte, oblivious to what was happening, continued their conversation and were surprised when the cops walked up to their table and informed them that they had to leave. Rashon and Donte told the cops they were at the Starbucks for a meeting. With no reason given by the cops, they arrested, handcuffed, and put the Black men into a police car. Their rights weren't read to them.
Luckily, onlookers who felt the men were treated unfairly captured the entire incident on video, leading to a public outcry and the Starbucks company going on a public apology tour. Starbucks closed down their stores across the country and held anti-racism seminars for their workers. Although Starbucks's website describes itself as "a place for people to meet and have public conversations," it seemed like this applied to everyone but Black people, which may explain why the white cashier felt emboldened to call the police on Rashon and Donte that day. Even with Starbucks's public apology, the larger system of white supremacy is too large for many Black people to feel safe.
Professor Mann believes that every time a white woman calls the police on a Black person in a public space, they (white women) invoke the rule of law. This law is the political philosophy that all citizens and institutions within a country, state, or community are accountable to the same laws.
"So, when these women are confronted about why they're calling the police, they say, 'these people are breaking the law.' But they can't point to a specific piece of code. They're calling the cops and saying, 'these people are breaking a social norm'. The Starbucks worker who called the police on the men working at Starbucks was very comfortable saying she didn't trust them, and she's fearful of them, which is not the same as calling the police on your neighbor and saying, 'I think my neighbor is breaking into my house.' "
In the incidents of white women calling the police on Black people (to name a few recent examples: while a Black person was barbecuing in the park, selling water on the street corner, visiting Starbucks, mowing the lawn, swimming at a public pool, using common areas at a university, or bird watching) these women are using the police as a shield and a vessel to criminalize Black people while they simply exist in a public space. This racializing of public safety has become so commonplace that even Black children, like Jeremiah Harvey, are not spared from its wrath and destruction.