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.
Fair enough. And if you gave me an earful for making an innocent mistake, you’d get one right back.
But the question I really wanted you to answer was the the more general one: is there such a thing as a reasonable policy that requires/encourages staff to call the police any time they see someone standing in the wrong place, full stop? No added context. No thinking. Just call. If so, that means I would have had the police called on me/mine 20 or more times in the last 8 to 10 years. Easily 20.
Not only does allowing for that seem monumentally stupid in and of itself, but it also seems like a TERRIBLE waste of enforcement resources. These people have better things to do than stand in for other people who lack the basic mental resources to exercise a little judgment. Can’t see who it is? Take a few steps closer. Re-evaluate. Still can’t see? Take a few more steps. If necessary, a few more. Ah, now you see! It’s not a gang banger! It’s a young-ish woman eating lunch on the Smith campus. Nothing at all “out of place” with that. Now you are in a position to decide: does this warrant a call to the police? Eh, no. I’ll go talk to her.
I think it still comes down to a matter of common sense and courtesy. Below is the location of the incident and the student.
She is more petite then the stuffed bear. Under what scenario would an adult male at 1:40 in the afternoon feel so threatened they couldn’t take a closer look before calling the police
I can’t tell you what was in the employees heart but clearly he had many options other then making that call.
On this I agree. To me, the biggest problem with how Smith handled this is in how ham-fisted it was in treating the staff into making them “the problem to be fixed” rather than “allies in the solution”.
To illustrate, notice how most people react much more positively to @CateCAParent than to my posts? Part of that is that she is more neutral than I, but a larger part is that she is much more diplomatic than I was in this thread. You are far more likely to listen to someone that you think treats you well than someone who you think treats you badly.
After the report came out, Kathleen could have gotten the staff on her side by publicly saying something like:
But if you look at the 100+ times the police were called for someone suspicious, the dispatcher said that 90% of the time they were just waiting for someone, or already gone. Meaning 90% of the time, the police is called on someone innocent (and the vast majority of the time, the “suspicious person” was white according to the dispatcher logs).
Why are you insistent upon judging the janitor more harshly than all those others that made the same mistake regarding suspicious behavior?
No there is no reasonable policy that encourages/requires staff to always call the police.
IANAL, but I suspect that the ambivalent policies were written that way because that’s what the lawyers approved. In other words, if Smith says “should approach” and a staff member gets hurt as a result, that’s a lawsuit on Smith’s hands. The “may approach” likely incurs less legal liability (Smith’s defense being that the staff member didn’t have to approach).
Perhaps a happy medium would be “Approach if safe to do so”.
@CateCAParent, I know your concern was with how to prevent an event like this from happening in the future, but have you noticed how since you mentioned your desire to better understand the perspective of the janitor, the conversation has regressed to right back where it was?
Justify and excuse the janitor’s behavior.
Demand proof that he was a racist.
Blame, belittle, and insult the student and minimize and dismiss the indignity of what happened to her.
Sweep it all under the rug so we can talk about more serious harms, like how Smith is a “neo-racist” institution for trying to take steps prevent future harms like those suffered by the student.
There is something fundamentally wrong with how these conversations are framed. The whole notion of “racism" has been turned on its head.
By the way, at the risk of triggering still more irrelevant justifications for the employee’s behavior, I thought I should point out that your speculation that the janitor "understood that it wasn’t his place to interact with students, faculty, guests, etc.” isn’t born out by the facts. He did interact with this student. He entered the room with the officer and repeatedly asked the student “why she was in the living room.” According to the officer, the “repetition of his question 'might not have come off as polite.’” So he not only interacted with her, he did so in away that may have seemed rude.*
(*Even though the officer thought the janitor may have sounded impolite, he also also said "'he did not believe that the Caller ‘was being impolite, or grilling her’ but instead repeated his question because he is hard of hearing.” Maybe. But it may be worth noting that once again the janitor is getting every benefit of the doubt. This is a good example of what I was referring to in my previous when I suggested the officer was treading lightly with regard to janitor’s behavior.)
I would agree it would have been accurate to say “Smith failed you,” because it did. The Janitor is Smith. Smith is the Janitor. They’re one. That’s just how it rolls. You are responsible for what your subordinates do. But sometimes your subordinates go on a frolic and detour. If they do, I think it’s ok to say, “Hey, that’s not the Smith way. We don’t do that. We’ll get this fixed. I’m responsible (and, she is).”
I would not agree that she should have said in effect, "don’t be mad at our dumb **** employee for being a dumb ****. He’s just being a dumb **** because of our dumb **** policy.
No. See my other post. Kathleen to Janitor in a private post-mortem: “Don’t know what you’re looking at? Take a few steps. Still can’t see? No problem. Take a few more. Ok, now you know what you’re looking at. Now decide about the cops. Oh, and as the president of this university, PLEASE don’t be a jack a** and call the cops for no reason on the people who pay the bills around here. There exists no such policy at Smith Mr. Janitor, and there never will. Make a little effort and don’t be so trigger happy. Use your brain.”
So now this janitor is reduced to a trigger happy “jacka” with no brain. Okay.
What would your “post mortem” be to Ms. Kanoute? Is there anything she might learn from this going forward ? I myself would advise her to carefully think for awhile before posting anything negative about others on social media.
Hey, I’m not the one who established that not much can be expected of these undereducated and underpaid people. The most important person in my life before getting married and having children was my paternal grandfather, who was an illiterate janitor who nonetheless had great judgment, perspective, intuition, work-ethic, moral compass and other virtues too many to list here. The man single handedly influenced the life course of at least two generations, going on three now. So you’ll not find me with the snob crowd. You’re jumping into a thread that has seen some passionate debate and in which I’ve had made the same point several times to no avail. Maybe I’m trying to get at the heart of the matter.
This guy? The one who called the cops on somebody he couldn’t see, thereby risking an unnecessary interaction with law enforcement with God knows who? Yeah, if he worked for me, we’d have had a sit-down after this during which we would have focused 100% on HIS decision making, not the student’s reaction.
What did the student ‘learn’? Well, her suspicion that she lives in a society full of people who don’t trust her just because of the way she looks was probably confirmed. I would guess.
And I’ve already shared that I didn’t agree with the doxing. But I’ve also not walked in her shoes and haven’t had to deal with this. Maybe this was the straw the broke the camel’s back for her. Who knows? I agree with others: some here want to skip over the janitor, or absolve him completely (just following the rules!) and focus entirely on the young woman who, I emphasize, WAS DOING NOTHING WRONG!!! At. All. Full. Stop.
Nothing wrong until she began doxxing people.
Being the victim is not a " get out of jail free card" for everything else you do thereafter. If I am attacked, I can’t randomly machine gun down everyone in sight because, you know, I was an innocent victim first.
Accountantability works both ways.
Aren’t the job expectations of women the same as those of men? Aren’t women just as capable of good judgement as men? I believe you were making this very point when you called me a sexist and highlighted “there are Navy seals that are 5’4”. “
Under the criteria you applied to me you have now “checked that sexist box”.
I’ll politely ask you to refrain from telling me what I mean; and I don’t need your help. I may have to flag you for hurting my feelings. I’m sure you understand.
I comprehend but we are talking about a male staff member not getting close enough to a 5 foot 2 inch skinny as a rail female student whose only describable attribute was apparently that she was black.
In your mind could her being black make her appear more threatening or out of place? If not then the picture I provided tells the entire story… a slight of stairs female. Why would you use terms like potential drug abuser, what do you base that on?
I do not make assumptions based on physical appearance and am disappointed that you do so judge.
You seem to think because she was female, a male janitor shouldn’t have called for help. That is simply inappropriate to assume. A person can call for help regardless of the weight, sex, height, age, or race of another. In fact, the policy permits that.
I guess we’re asking the janitors to take their lives into their own hands working on an all-women’s college campus in Western MA. Now we’re asking him to get close enough to see what he’s actually looking at? Sounds super dangerous. I wonder what in this fact scenario makes this poster see “danger”?
This thread has unfortunately become a real circus. Too bad.
