I think the propping open the door thing (which didn’t happen when I was there, as I recall) is actually an artifact of greater general security at Yale. In the old days, the residential college gates and (I think) entryway doors were typically unlocked, at least during the day, and the doors to suites were locked. Now, the gates and entryways are locked, so some students leave the suite doors unlocked for convenience (i.e., so they won’t need a key when the go to the bathroom, if it’s in the hall). The problem with this is that criminals learn how to get into gates and entryway doors by following other students in.
Earlier someone referred to the suspect as having committed only a property crime. However, subsequent articles indicate that the suspect entered and robbed students’ rooms while they were present or sleeping. That is different, and indicates a more dangerous person than someone who burglarizes empty places.
Hunt, I don’t know your race but I (a white woman living in a traditionally but gentrifying-whitening neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY) suspect that this, as is the case with many policing activities, may be a case where a black kid is much more likely to face more aggressive police tactics than a white kid. This is regardless of the race of the officer. It’s certainly that way here in NYC, much to the distress of good citizens with dark skin.
My daughter (Chinese-American) was a freshman at a high-achieving test-in high school in Brooklyn. When she was a freshman, she observed a discussion among East Asian (mostly Chinese) and South Asian (mostly Bangladeshi) boys about whether the policeman was their friend. Big difference between the experiences of the two groups! And I remember when my kid was 5 or 6, sitting on the stoop playing with Barbies and talking to her African American friends and learning that what she learned in the standard pre-k curriculum about helpful police officers was not necessarily the case for everyone.
This was a black cop looking for a black suspect. Oy. I don’t know about the gun being drawn but have no reason to think that was racial, either.
Well, I do have to wonder what would have happened if the description had been “tall white male wearing dark clothing.” I find it hard to believe that the Yale police would have drawn a gun on a random white guy coming out of the library wearing a dark sweatshirt. Now, as I said before, I do think it matters how specific the description was and how closely the student fit it. Maybe if the description was “tall white male wearing dark clothing and a red-and-white hat,” the police might have stopped any tall white guy wearing a red and white hat. Maybe.
And let me add the following–it’s not an excuse, but it is probably part of the explanation. There are relatively few African-American students at Yale as compared to white students. So any given tall AA male in dark clothing is somewhat more likely to be the suspect you are looking for than any given tall white male in dark clothing would be if that were the description. I don’t think that’s enough to justify profiling, though.
It’s an interesting question as to how specific the description has to be before you can justify stopping everybody who fits it–or draw a gun on everybody who fits it.
I remember it happening when I went to college (not at Yale, but where the SES demographics were far lower than Yale on average, though still there were plenty of security-naive students from low crime areas). And the dorm RAs were always telling residents not to do that because thieves and worse would come in (because thieves and worse did come in).
I don’t think the columnist is necessarily questioning why his son was stopped, I think what he is questioning is why the cop went for his gun and whether his son being black had anything to do with it, that there was an automatic assumption that if a suspected perp is black, it is also likely that they are armed. If he somehow matched the description, there might be grounds for them questioning him (though I am also dubious of this, I have seen far too many cases of this in NYC where the cops roust a guy who is 6’ 2" tall and 250 pounds and black, where the suspect was described as being 5’ 8 160 pounds, the only similarity was they were both black), but it is the automatic response of fear that is the problem. Yes, New Haven is not exactly a garden spot, and it has real problems with shootings and gang violence and the like, but when you stop someone who is otherwise cooperating, the only reason the cop seemed to pull the gun was because the kid was black.
The fact that the cop was black himself doesn’t change that, last I checked there was evidence that black cops often use their weapons more than white cops do when the suspect is black…and based on what I have seen and read, it is because like their white counterparts, they often have the same assumptions…my take is the guard had a call for a robbery suspect, saw this kid, thought he could be it, and immediately reacted thinking ‘this kid likely has a gun, better get the drop on him’…and that is what leads to kids being killed. A classic example of this was the Amadou Diallo case in NYC, where a group of cops ended up killing an unarmed guy who was in the vestibule of his apartment building, reaching for his wallet…the cops were not in the open, they were behind a cop car, yet when he reached for his wallet they opened fire and shot the poor guy to death, when their lives were not in danger. The area in question was a bad area (Soundview in the Bronx), that at the time had a lot of drug dealing and gang violence, and the cops panicked, seeing a black guy reach for something, they panicked and opened fire (and before anyone tells me how could I know, my uncles had a construction business that did a lot of work in the South Bronx, I worked summers for them back in the late 70’s, and I saw how cops can panic and such)
I also wonder why the cops, after checking his id, insisted on holding him, aggressively checking him out. The kid was legimately on campus, so why hold him the way they did?
I am not a knee jerk liberal who thinks the cops are always wrong, I am not someone who sees police brutality in everything (having worked in bad areas, lived in a marginal area of the Bronx, I also know what the cops face and that what is portrayed by people like Al Sharpton is often complete BS)…however, I also think that having cops with a hair on the trigger finger is going to get a lot of innocent people hurt or killed, that is the problem with it, and if they automatically have in their mind that every black or hispanic kid they pull over is automatically a gang banger or a violent criminal, that is the problem. Good cops don’t do that, they know how to read a suspect, they know how to protect themselves, and the problem is when you have a cop who has the mentality the cop on the Yale campus had, especially when they are armed, that anyone they stop is immediately a threat to kill them, they panic, and that is when bad things happen IME.
I think it must be terrifying for any student, having just walked out of the library, to be suddenly staring into the barrel of a gun.
I personally think that if a Yale cop thought he had found and stopped the correct suspect, he would have pulled his gun regardless of the suspect’s race. This was a repeat intruder who had been entering and robbing students’ dorm rooms while they were present. That is a bold, dangerous person, to me.
Well, the suspect never exhibited a weapon in any of the incidents, and never physically attacked anybody. He was invading dorms, so I think it’s not an easy call. I do think it bears some serious thought about whether it would have happened this way if the suspect had been white.
The reason Yale has an armed police force is pretty simply, New Haven as a city is way up there in terms of crime, ot has 4 times the murder rate of the US as a whole, it has twice the rape rate, 5 times the robbery and about 2.5 times the rate of assault and in terms of overall safety, is in the bottom 5% of safety among US cities. Obviously, that doesn’t mean those numbers apply to kids on the Yale Campus or nearby, in the 1980’s when NYC had a ridiculously high murder rate, much of that was concentrated on certain areas of the city and it is much the same way with New Haven. The reason that Yale has armed police with full police powers is that given the nature of the city they are in, they need that to protect the campus and also the cops themselves (or so they feel). It is very easy to say Yale is no different than any school in a city, but that isn’t entirely true, the status you see on crime at Yale also reflect more than likely that they spend a lot of time and money on security, probably also have strong presence of New Haven police in the area…I went to NYU in the early 80’s in Greenwhich Village, and it was very different than someone going to Columbia (surrounded by morningside heights and Harlem to the north), and it would be very different for someone going to Pratt in Brooklyn, which was in a really crappy area (at the time)…
In all fairness to Yale, it is likely that the neighborhood around Yale is probably a lot safer than the statistics to the city as a whole, but that doesn’t mean you don’t go in with your eyes wide open. I was admitted to University of Chicago, which was then in a bad area (don’t know about today, though it is the south side of Chicago), and basically as a student you need to be aware of that, and deal with where you are going to school. When I went to NYU, incidents happened,two Chinese gangs went at it at a party being held by one of the Asian student groups and some kids ended up dead, kids would get drunk and wander over into Alphabet City (today home to million dollar + condos, then pretty bad) and end up in trouble…not to mention that students seem to get into trouble all over the place, albeit of a different sort shrug.
A dorm-room robber in the Northeast is going to know that students won’t be allowed to have guns in their rooms. They are pretty easy prey, especially if the robber has a gun with him in his pocket.
This doesn’t sound like a robber with a gun in his pocket.
Maybe we’ll eventually learn if the suspect was armed when he was actually arrested. I wonder if perhaps he’s a juvenile, since his name hasn’t been released.
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Lol, what does a guy with a gun in his pocket “sound” like? You could make a lot of money if you knew the answer to that.
@Bay " I personally think that if a Yale cop thought he had found and stopped the correct suspect, he would have pulled his gun regardless of the suspect’s race. This was a repeat intruder who had been entering and robbing students’ dorm rooms while they were present. That is a bold, dangerous person, to me."
Possibly. If they were able to show that in similar cases on campus where the suspect was white, they have also pointed guns at white students, that would support that view.
Wouldn’t training and experience also “support that view?” Must we find a white perpetrator with the same m.o. in order to believe that the officer’s actions were reasonable? Under your argument, wouldn’t it need to be the same officer, with the exact same training, with the exact same specific knowledge about exact same incidents? Or could it be any white guy who stole one pair of shoes in an empty dorm room who didn’t get stopped at gun point to prove your argument?
“Wouldn’t training and experience also “support that view?” Must we find a white perpetrator with the same m.o. in order to believe that the officer’s actions were reasonable?”
I think it is both. What training or experience made him think he needed to draw his gun? I did not suggest that that was the only acceptable evidence.
I know police have a tough job. I also walked around Yale and the area off campus is not the best. It is not unreasonable for an officer to be nervous.
However, pointing a loaded gun at students leaving the library is concerning. If the young man reaches for his ID card, is he dead? An officer with a gun has a big responsibility.
I am not asserting that the officer was wrong. I am not knowledgeable enough and I wasn’t there. However, if campus police had drawn a gun on my daughter as she left the library, I would be upset and want a thorough explanation of why a loaded gun was drawn. I would want to know whether this a standard procedure that has occurred in other situations or whether she “just didn’t look white,” oops, I mean “just didn’t look right.”
It is a reasonable question.
I agree with you. I would want to know if it is common for robbery suspects to be armed. I’m going to guess that it is, and that is enough to make me feel okay about the officer drawing his weapon.
Can we get our vocabulary straight about criminals and suspects?
The guy that walks into your dorm room and takes your stuff is a criminal.
The guy that police see that they think matches the victims’ description of the criminal is the suspect.
Sounds like Blow Jr. was, for a short while, a suspect. We’ll probably hear more about exactly what happened.
Also - the officer pointed a “loaded gun”? Whatever other kind of gun would you want the officer to have?