With all due respect, you’re asking me to read a bunch of words that keep saying the same thing. The report is the report. Thanks to the NY Times, the Report, this thread, and @mtmind 's excellent summation, we all have a pretty fair grasp of the facts.
You among the champions of the other side (of me) here appear to be pretty sincere in debating above board. At least that’s how I see it and don’t mean to offend. So I assume you are of the belief that the janitor is not in fact some automaton incapable of thinking. If that’s true, then would you believe a policy exists that expects these thinking people to call the police whenever anyone is in an unauthorized area? Take my experience of walking on the wet floor. Or wandering into a closed area of the library, which also actually happened to me at Smith. Should the police have been called? If not, how is this woman eating lunch really any different? Again, not a rhetorical question, so I’m dying for one of you to answer it.
I meant to reply to the thread and not at you, so I did not expect you specifically to answer.
I posted this section without comment because I think there is enough there for everyone to interpret it the way they want. Even excluding the part where it says that the investigative party didn’t find a violation, someone with a bias to find the janitor innocent would focus upon
and
Whereas those who think the janitor guilty will instead focus upon the fact that he had discretion but didn’t use it.
Now, couple it with this snippet from the report:
In other words, most calls to the police cause an officer to show up when nobody has done anything wrong. It’s likely that in many instances calls to the police were made without approaching these people, because if a person says they are just waiting for a few minutes, you would likely let them wait.
My point is that this situation has likely played itself out dozens of times in the hundred plus calls recorded for 2015 and 2016. Nobody was alarmed enough in those other instances that it became news. But in this case, it did.
The ingredients for this to go bad have long existed, in part, due to an unclear policy.
Since you said, not a rhetorical question, if I were a student, I would not call the police on you. If I were the janitor who had just done it, I would be pissed and you would get an earful. But no call to the police.
That’s fair and I get what you are getting at. But the key word in all of that is “suspicious”. As a POC myself who passes as white and upper middle class based on who I’m with (usually my spouse and/or my D, both of whom suggest membership in the same demographic), how I dress and how I appear (clean with clean clothes that are somewhere in the zip code of current fashion), I don’t have to tell you that nobody is calling the police on us unless we are acting very suspiciously. Over the years I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told “You can’t go in there,” or “You’re not supposed to be here,” or “This is a restricted area”. On campuses from Smith to Wesleyan to Brown to Stanford to Penn, the entire NESCAC and you name it. Two of my three are athletes, so I’ve really made the rounds and found myself on dozens and dozens of college campuses, day noon and at night. In all of those visits and through all of my and my spouse’s and my kids’ various missteps, we’ve never had to answer to the police. Not one time.
“ My point is that this situation has likely played itself out dozens of times in the hundred plus calls recorded for 2015 and 2016. ”
I understand and respect your point but thousands upon thousands of daily interactions take place between students and staff in a year. You highlight that this sort of police/student interaction played out dozens of times amongst 100ish calls to the police.
There is no way to quantify or calculate the immeasurable number of times employees have satisfied their concerns and not called the police.
If a 100ish calls were made to the police clearly an enormous multiple of that amount were circumstances that the employee and student managed to work it out with no escalation.
Calling the police was not and should not be the norm.
I will take your vote, @cquin85 , as a yes that you would have had no problem with the janitor himself politely inquiring - let’s put it that way - of this young woman. You are also dead sure that she herself wouldn’t have had a problem with that sort of approach. We don’t know the answer to that one, but I am less certain than you. As Hebe says, the report refers to many campus police interactions with students of all colors without incident. What made this one different from all those? How can we rule out that this young woman had a particular vulnerability or simply a personality that made a very big deal out of an otherwise pleasant interaction with a friendly guy known to her who happened to be wearing a uniform. Take off the blinkers of ideology and this becomes highly likely. We all have our quirks and most of us are not entirely defined by the color of our skins. Human variability and eccentricity explain a lot of human life and are the fascinated study of all of us, whether it be the latest gossip about our neighbors or depictions in the works of Shakespeare and Dickens. Why does all that knowledge go out the window with certain subject matters?
Someone referred to the egg-shell skull rule in law, drawing the conclusion that all the harm that cascaded from that brief meeting was attributable to the janitor. I’m inclined to agree with the egg-shell part of it, minus any evidence of harm actually done to the skull in question. There are a lot of vicarious egg-shell skulls out there.
You are using a completely theoretical response on the students part to suggest the same “big picture” outcome. Who knows who cares.
You can’t act badly like the caller, elicit a severe response and then say that severe response would have happened regardless. Life and logic don’t work that way.
Example: Man approaches a women at a bar and becomes inappropriate. Drink gets thrown in his face. He explains I knew she was the type to throw a drink in a guys face. That’s called victim shaming.
You missed the thrust of my reply, which was, why ask? The original intent seemed to be to make out the student as unreasonable or hysterical. You now seem to be doubling down on it.
Everything you said could be the case could, of course, be the case. Many things are possible. But as @EconPop would hasten to point out, that has nothing to do with this. He didn’t approach her reasonably but instead found her to be ‘suspicious’ for utterly innocuous and unsuspicious behavior/activity. Why he did that is, IMO, the question you should be asking.
Remember, you’re not a prosecutor here. Your job isn’t to discredit the victim. This is just a discussion. Why assume something into evidence that isn’t there and for which there is no basis to suspect it’s there? We have been given zero reason to think that she would have reacted the same way if the janitor had used his brain even a little. None. Zero.
What I think you’re really getting at, as a couple of other posters have been getting at, is that her reaction to having had the police called on her for no reason doesn’t sit well with you. And if that is your stance, then you demonstrate no sensitivity or awareness of the history of black people with the police in this country, never mind some of the other more subtle dynamics here like the historical baggage black students bring with them (or are saddled with by others) on elite college campuses. If that’s the case, it’s well beyond the scope of my participation here to go over those things. @hebegebe understands and has acknowledged those issues and he/she is firmly on the other side of the debate here.
You are right that this is the key word. But despite every caller’s best intentions, we see that the caller is wrong the vast majority of the time about their suspicion. Some innocent person gets approached by the police, possibly gets afraid, has a short discussion, and the officer leaves. Perhaps the person is shaken up at being approached. But in any case, everyone moves on.
On this we agree. The policy should be changed.
But given this situation has happened many times, was the janitor’s mistaken suspicion different from all the other mistakes?
And for all the pleasant back-and-forth between you and me, we are basically right were you and I began. For all for contemplative understanding that I perceived went on between us, neither has materially changed his/her mind in any substantive way.
You still feel the janitor (and cafeteria worker?) possibly did nothing wrong. You think it possible (maybe “likely”) that while the victim’s harm was real, it may have been caused more by her perception of why she thinks the Event happened, but you’re not willing to lean into blaming the janitor. I feel the janitor acted with malice aforethought and is wholly responsible for anything that happened afterward.
While you aren’t convinced of the janitor’s guilt of anything specific, you are convinced the victim misbehaved in some of her actions and you think that she should carry some blame for the perceived harm she inflicted. I can hardly believe that remains a talking point in this discussion.
As (I think) you said earlier @CateCAParent , you are trying to walk the middle road in this discussion. I think you think you’re walking the line, but it’s apparent that will you may be close to the line you are solidly on one side of it.
To me, this is simply more of the same routine of "find fault with the African-American victim, find “reasonable doubt” to blame the white perpetrator. Trayvon Martin had an attitude and the white guy was just defending himself. George Floyd deserved his fate because he passed a fake $20 and poor Chauvin was only doing his job. We can go back as far as Emmett Till, where some people to this day say the teenager was partly responsible for his own kidnapping, lynching, and murder. Ms Kanoute obviously got too emotional and possibly overreacted, but the cafeteria worker was only a poor white soul doing her best to follow protocol in a world that doesn’t understand her.
I’m not saying YOU feel that way about all these cases. I admit that I am guilty of what you accused me of earlier, of lumping several responses from various people into one thought. But the bottom line remains the same as it always has in the big picture of the majority view: The white person either didn’t do it, had a reason to do it, did it but didn’t harbor any ill will or bigotry, was only doing their job, etc. The black person somehow caused it, did something else wrong either before or after the incident, should be blamed for every perceived fault, and should think about how to handle such incidents better in the future, lest the black person also be responsible for setting race relations back 20 years.
Cate, I mean this with no animosity. I’m just tired. When even you, who ostensibly tried to listen with a somewhat open mind - at least you asked some of the right questions - when even you continue to absolve the white perpetrator and find fault with the black victim, I feel my spirits dip a little.
In the test tube of this CC thread, a few whites are sort-of kind-of with a little reservation, on the side of the victim. A few are solidly on the side of the perpetrator. And it seems most are either silent or walking the line but keeping both feet clearly on the side of absolving the perpetrator. I’m not saying you personally “should” be able to overcome that feeling. I’m just saying it honestly saddens me, because if you don’t get it, America really has a very very very long way to go. And that means that one day, my daughters may be put in the same position as Ms Kanoute. Or even worse. And white America will largely blame my brown-skinned nappy-haired daughters for whatever happens to them and absolve their white perpetrators.
Ok, but then we have to get back to a point which, somewhere way back in this thread you seemed to have acknowledged: interactions between black people and the police invoke some unpleasant history. Which means we have to acknowledge that context.
I don’t have all the answers for this, and I’m sure everybody would like a do-over here. But to try and evaluate the kid’s reaction in an antiseptic environment of no context is to be disingenuous IMO. Most people would be annoyed and somewhat offended by having someone call the police on them for no good reason. Add in race and you have added an ingredient that makes the situation at least a tad worse. She didn’t create the historical context. She just lives with it.
Do posters think Smith staff are now more or less likely to call campus security if they see someone they don’t recognize in a closed area of a building?
I assume there is data on all the campus security calls that have been made since this incident, but I haven’t seen it, and don’t know if the volume is up or down. (although the covid experience of the last 18 months means we might not be able to draw any conclusions).
You are using a completely theoretical response on the students part to suggest the same “big picture” outcome. Who knows who cares.
You can’t act badly like the caller, elicit a severe response and then say that severe response would have happened regardless. Life and logic don’t work that way.
Example: Man approaches a women at a bar and becomes inappropriate. Drink gets thrown in his face. He explains I knew she was the type to throw a drink in a guys face. That’s caused victim shaming.
Bingo. And it’s also called a red herring. Make the subject of the debate seem unreasonable and hysterical despite no supporting evidence, and poof! We’re not talking about the janitor’s culpability anymore.
Or just maybe, @econpop, and cquin85, we have daughters who have already been in a situation like this ( or have been subject to it ourselves), and did not choose to react the way the Smith student did. Maybe there are even other Smith kids who have been in this exact situation who reacted differently. For all we know, it happened not infrequently and most students did not give the matter a second thought. I did not focus on it much, myself, when my kid was questioned by security in a somewhat similar situation.
This particular student may have had reason to be particularly sensitive, and maybe that was justified, but pointing out others might react differently doesn’t make us racist anymore than your assumption that the call was based on racist reasons.
Post covid, of course, I would expect everything changed anyway.
[quote=“Mwfan1921, post:212, topic:2106617, full:true”] Do posters think Smith staff are now more or less likely to call campus security if they see someone they don’t recognize in a closed area of a building?
I assume there is data on all the campus security calls that have been made since this incident, but I haven’t seen it, and don’t know if the volume is up or down. (although the covid experience of the last 18 months means we might not be able to draw any conclusions). [/quote]
That’s the thing about life. There aren’t many areas that unburden us from our responsibility to use our brains.
Will Smith staff be less likely to call the police the next time they see a black person doing nothing wrong but perhaps technically standing in the wrong place? I hope so.
Will Smith staff be less likely to call the police the next time they see a middle-aged man of any race lurking around the President’s house at night with seemingly no good reason to be there? Doubt it.
Will Smith staff be less likely to call the police the next time they see a black person assaulting someone on the Smith campus? Doubt it.
If there is to be a chilling effect here, it will be a chilling effect on lazy evaluations of what does and does not constitute suspicious behavior. So the next time any student, white or black, is spotted sitting or standing in the wrong place with no other obvious indicator of wrong-doing? Yes, less likely. And that’s a good thing even from a civil rights perspective, regardless of race.
Based on your experience as a security guard? A member of the union of Smith staff? On what are you basing these assertions, as I have heard many, many comments to the contrary. That is rational, as the risk is high, and the benefit, if any, of a call will not accrue to the caller, but to the community.
Of course, if the caller is personally threatened, they will call. Otherwise, safest thing to do is walk away. What happens, happens. Do not get involved.
Maybe this, maybe that. For all we know. Anything, it seems, to avoid taking on the reality of the historical loading of black people being harassed by police, which you’ve already written off with, “just go with it and you’ll be happier in life.”
And, of course, not a single person in this thread has accused you or anyone in the forum of being racist. It must be red herring season around here.
If I had 100 years to debate with you, about anything, I’m fairly clear I’d make no headway. And since you’ve already pulled the flag card on me for daring to question your rather hyperbolic predictions of race relations a decade on from now, it would seem you are probably someone that I’d do better to avoid in the forums lest I get tagged.
I think part of the issue may have been that the janitor did not know for sure this was even a Smith student , or a female. In hindsight, could he have approached Ms. Kanoute and asked her what she was doing in an area he thought was restricted before he called for unarmed safety officers? Of course. But you know what they say about hindsight!
The question is not could he (or the cafeteria worker) have approached a teenage girl and asked her if she belonged. The question is, upon seeing a teenage girl eating in a college cafeteria, why would anyone question whether she belonged there? Similar to the black Yale student who had the police called on her for falling asleep while studying on campus. Every college campus I’ve ever been on, I’ve seen students nodding off in public and eating in public without people thinking they didn’t belong there and calling the police.
It’s just a very odd thought to start with: See a teenager on a college campus doing nothing wrong, and decide to call the police
But the law firm found that no violation of policy was found, no law broken (not that there was ever a claim that a law was broken). The finding was that no racial discrimination occurred. I didn’t read that the law firm made any recommendations for changes.
What should be done? Should she get damages? From who? What are those damages? Should an employee be fired if he didn’t violate policy?
I don’t think any changes were made to policies at Smith. An employee should still call security if he/she sees something suspicious. Students still have to follow the rules about being in buildings only with permission (card access, leaving when the building closes) and expect to be questioned by employees or security if they are in places that are closed.
