Racial Profiling via Nextdoor.com
October 8, 2015 10:28 AM   Subscribe

"Under the 'Crime and Safety' section of the site, the tone is much less neighborly. There, residents frequently post unsubstantiated 'suspicious activity' warnings that result in calls to the police on Black citizens who have done nothing wrong." posted by goatdog (88 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
And this is why the reaction to Peeple was so scathing.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:29 AM on October 8, 2015 [9 favorites]


James is a mixed-race, dark-skinned Black teenager who is soft-spoken and looks about three years older than his actual age.

I immediately begin wondering what race the author is, since non-white kids are frequently thought to "look older than they are."
posted by agregoli at 10:41 AM on October 8, 2015 [40 favorites]


This is exactly why I closed my NextDoor account. It was too depressing to see my neighbors' racism on full display.
posted by lsy at 10:41 AM on October 8, 2015 [11 favorites]


non-white kids are frequently thought to "look older than they are."

...which is weird, because white people are pretty much the least neotenous of the bunch.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:43 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


On Nextdoor and a neighborhood Yahoo group, residents celebrated the private security guard for shooting the teenager — and organized to buy him a thank-you gift.

Bounties. Same as with Zimmerman, Wilson, et al. I would love to see writers start calling these what they are. "Before and during his trial for killing the unarmed black teenager, Such-and-such was paid a bounty of $800,000 via gofundme and other fundraising sites."

I'm on the Nextdoor list for my neighborhood here in ATX, and I monitor it for exactly the kind of things described in this article. I have not yet seen black, African-American, or Latino as a descriptor come up in the many, many messages about "suspicious" individuals that get posted each week, but every time there's a post about a "suspicious" looking or acting person, I find myself thinking, "I would bet my next paycheck that the person in question is, or appears, Latino or black."

My wife and our two biracial kids are planning on moving into a gated community in the spring, and I've started speculating on how long it will be before someone calls the cops on me when they see me walking through the neighborhood without my family. When I'm feeling generous, I figure it'll be two weeks. When I'm feeling hopeless, I figure it'll be two days.
posted by lord_wolf at 10:48 AM on October 8, 2015 [30 favorites]


Living Colour - Funny Vibe
posted by goatdog at 10:52 AM on October 8, 2015 [5 favorites]


Nextdoor posts are pretty weird but I haven't seen any racism in my 'hood, although I haven't looked very hard for it either. It was exciting to gossip about WTF my one neighbour was thinking when his 100-foot-tall antenna assembly blew into our powerlines and browned out the neighbourhood. And I felt compelled to let everyone know the time I get egged walking my dog (protip: a down jacket lets eggs bounce off you harmlessly).

But basically people are pretty terrible and fairly petty at the best of time. At the worst... well, at least now you know what they really think.
posted by GuyZero at 10:53 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


I immediately begin wondering what race the author is, since non-white kids are frequently thought to "look older than they are."

I'm not sure if there's any racial angle to that comment since, as you say, some kids of all races look older than they are. Usually it just means tall but who knows what it means beyond what it says.
posted by GuyZero at 10:54 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


GuyZero, agregoli was making a reference to the phenomenon explained here: People - Including Cops -- See Black Kids as Less Innocent and Less Young than White Kids.
posted by lord_wolf at 10:58 AM on October 8, 2015 [29 favorites]


I haven't yet seen this on NextDoor.com for my suburban Austin neighborhood, but man was it apparent on the neighborhood CrimeWatch Facebook pages before ND came along (no idea why the crazies haven't migrated yet to ND) before I unsubscribed for blood pressure reasons.

Every time there was a minor crime (or alleged minor crime), people started blaming it on the (overwhelming Hispanic) workers who are working on new homes. In a couple of instances, the perpetrators were later caught and in both those cases, it was white teens who lived in the neighborhood.

In one thread, I cautioned another commenter, "You might not want to use the word 'thug.' It's racially charged" (used in reference to an African-American accused criminal whose photo was in the news) I thought that was a very mild, indirect admonition, but holy hell, did I catch shit, just like this article mentions. I immediately unsubscribed and haven't looked back.
posted by tippiedog at 11:06 AM on October 8, 2015 [5 favorites]


Oh, and like odinsdream mentions above, I'm REALLY freaked out by the neighbors who consistently talk about using their handgun to protect themselves from every perceived threat, no matter how minor or imagined. I'm sure it's 95% bluster, but mindset behind that really disturbs me.
posted by tippiedog at 11:08 AM on October 8, 2015 [6 favorites]


My Nextdoor community fears poor people of ALL races, so take that!
posted by redsparkler at 11:12 AM on October 8, 2015 [8 favorites]


Not available in Canada (we don't have zip codes or states). Excellent.
posted by Mogur at 11:13 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


I haven't cancelled my NextDoor membership but it was pretty empty for my southeast side Austin neighborhood so I rapidly stopped checking in. I know APD works with them, though, because I occasionally get emails about neighborhood/area meetings. I'm just NE of the intersection of 35 and 71, in an area that used to be families and college students but is rapidly gentrifying (which I say as a gentrifier in a nominally gated neighborhood) and I'm pretty sure I don't want to know what my fellow white neighbors are doing or saying on NextDoor now that I've read this article.

(On the other hand, maybe I should be telling them to STFU until I get my ass kicked off NextDoor for being a troublemaker. Not sure my blood pressure could stand for it.)
posted by immlass at 11:15 AM on October 8, 2015


Dispatches from a nice polite racist neighborhood (Santa Monica).
posted by mogget at 11:27 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yup, this has been the case with my (Seattle) neighborhood's Nextdoor site. I stopped reading after a thread in which people posted concerns about black men "who look Somali or Ethiopian" using car2go in the neighborhood because clearly they were using them for drug dealing purposes.
posted by joan_holloway at 11:30 AM on October 8, 2015


My Nextdoor community fears poor people of ALL races, so take that!

My experience with Nextdoor is similar. Not much talk about black people, but lots of discussion about homeless and property crime.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:32 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


Oh God, there's so much racism in neighborhood listservs and blogs everything. There are some neighborhood blogs in DC that I just can't read because they're so effing racist (and also classist, but especially racist). It's really awful the things people not only think but are completely comfortable with expressing.

There's a comment above which reminded me of something Greg Nog posted on his Twitter about a woman in his neighborhood freaking out because a bunch of Black kids were going door to door offering to mow lawns and she was all upset because like she thought they came from another neighborhood or harass people or something? And all I could think was "if you are going to be pissed about a bunch of minority kids doing something actively entrepreneurial that doesn't hurt anyone you are never, EVER allowed to use the word 'bootstraps' in any circumstances."
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:35 AM on October 8, 2015 [64 favorites]


But Mrs. Pterodactyl, I think those types of people think bootstraps are only meant for white people.
posted by Annika Cicada at 11:40 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


I would like to share this article with my neighborhood listserv (which is actually a private Facebook group these days), but I don't think I can stomach another ignorant pile-on from those folks. A few weeks ago, on this same group, many folks were suggesting that a poster call 911 when she reported that she saw two black teens "looking suspicious but not doing anything illegal" on a main thoroughfare in our neighborhood. (Another very active discussion recently was about how pairs of shoes thrown over a power line indicated a drug dealer's base of operations.) This kind of discourse is definitely not limited to Nextdoor.
posted by theraflu at 11:44 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


But Mrs. Pterodactyl, I think those types of people think bootstraps are only meant for white people.

Right, exactly, and also the less you need bootstraps the more entitled to them you are; upper middle class White kids starting lemonade stands = cute and good heads for business, other kids who might actually need/appreciate the money = difficult nuisances.

It's a depressing reflection of trends kids might see their whole lives; if your parents have the wherewithal to bankroll your lemonade stand and so you don't need the money, you'll probably get more praise and earn more than if you work hard because this is actually a priority for you. What a shitty life lesson.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:46 AM on October 8, 2015 [11 favorites]


I'm pleasantly surprised that the "Crime And Safety" section for my neighborhood on NextDoor only mentions illegal dumping and speeding. No racist dog whistling as of yet.
posted by monospace at 11:50 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


My (admittedly extremely diverse) neighborhood is clearly an outlier. Everyone seems to be unfailingly polite and helpful. The Crime & Safety section goes practically unused and leans heavily towards the latter.
posted by JaredSeth at 11:50 AM on October 8, 2015


Hey did you hear someone took a purse out of an unlocked car two streets over? THEREFORE GUNS
posted by freecellwizard at 11:52 AM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Haven't seen any racism on NextDoor yet but they only opened up to my neighborhood a few months ago so there's plenty of time.
posted by octothorpe at 11:54 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Mod note: One comment deleted. I'm sure the intention is good, but getting into the founder's race even ironically (to point out how wrong that is) will take us in a weird direction here, better not to do that.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:55 AM on October 8, 2015


I feel like conversations about racism go much more poorly when they're about specific circumstances in which the white person has to justify their fear of a specific person of color. Because, to that person, the fear is real, even if to everyone else it's stupid. And if you argue with the person, they take it to mean that you're telling them they don't have a right to be scared, or to protect themselves or their home.

When, in fact, the point isn't that they don't have the right to feel scared — it's that their fear sensors are poorly calibrated due to internalized, subconscious racism. But if you say that to someone, you'll piss them off, even if you're right.
posted by savetheclocktower at 11:55 AM on October 8, 2015 [9 favorites]


So on my Nextdoor feed today, excluding the benign stuff...

* Our local police blotter gets posted weekly which is always interesting.
* Complaints that Apple's second and third local campuses are going to make traffic hell (not even a zero-th world problem)
* A post saying how this news article is an embarrassment for the entire community: Neighbor Lawsuit Seeks to Declare Autistic Boy a “Public Nuisance”, which is pretty much the truth
* Discussions about a racoon: "He isn't easily scared, and hissed at us multiple times. He is really big. On his hind legs he could easily be 4.5 ft tall."
* "If you have any recommendations, based on personal experience, on donating or recycling old corporate award plaques, please share!"
* complaint about people not picking up dog poop
* "There is a leather couch on school grounds at the intersection of X and Y. We noticed it last night (with a dozen 11 year old boys jumping on it). I hope someone will claim it before school starts Tuesday so students and staff don't have to deal with it."

Not sure whether I live in heaven or hell.

It's too bad that Oakland (which is not that far from my neighbourhood) sees Nextdoor turn so ugly.
posted by GuyZero at 11:57 AM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


To add: subscribing to my local crime watch group in Chicago sends my blood pressure sky-high. When I'm not a member, the neighborhood somehow feels safer, like the kind of place in which children can play unsupervised (and they frequently do!). When I'm subscribed, I'm constantly looking over my shoulder for muggers, creeps and criminals whenever I leave the house. No amount of statistics indicating a downward trend in crime seems to help to shake the fear of violence brought on by a steady stream of victims and witnesses reporting their experiences in real time. Despite the fact that many of the reports are just that: reports, and provided by unreliable and often prejudiced narrators, who wouldn't want to know about hyperlocal crime? To ignore it would be folly. It's the effect of victim blaming yet again: to feel that when you ignore reports of crime, you shouldn't be terribly surprised when crime happens to you. And so on.

I think a lot of people feel this way, and unless you're self-aware and tuned into different people's experiences, it's downright hard to separate a confused perception of risk from years of racist cultural programming.
posted by theraflu at 12:01 PM on October 8, 2015 [6 favorites]


Not sure whether I live in heaven or hell.

It's too bad that Oakland (which is not that far from my neighbourhood) sees Nextdoor turn so ugly.


You probably just live in a neighborhood with comparatively few black or Latin@ people? Even if it's not just whites there, racist whites don't tend to have the same "those are crime people" triggers when it comes to, e.g., East Asian people.
posted by invitapriore at 12:06 PM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


GuyZero, I would think four and a half foot tall raccoons would clear that question right up.
posted by JaredSeth at 12:10 PM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


There are plenty of Latino people and at least some black people - it ain't Palo Alto but for sure it's not Oakland either.

I mostly find it amusing that a racoon created the most comments that my neighbourhood has had in a while. Some people were genuinely surprised that big aggressive raccoons exist. In Toronto you'll find a racoon in your bedroom at night with a switchblade demanding money.
posted by GuyZero at 12:10 PM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


To add: subscribing to my local crime watch group in Chicago sends my blood pressure sky-high. When I'm not a member, the neighborhood somehow feels safer, like the kind of place in which children can play unsupervised (and they frequently do!). When I'm subscribed, I'm constantly looking over my shoulder for muggers, creeps and criminals whenever I leave the house. No amount of statistics indicating a downward trend in crime seems to help to shake the fear of violence brought on by a steady stream of victims and witnesses reporting their experiences in real time. Despite the fact that many of the reports are just that: reports, and provided by unreliable and often prejudiced narrators, who wouldn't want to know about hyperlocal crime? To ignore it would be folly. It's the effect of victim blaming yet again: to feel that when you ignore reports of crime, you shouldn't be terribly surprised when crime happens to you. And so on.


On Everyblock there was a woman who was posting about how she was now trapped in her apartment and would not go out for fear of crime. She had everything delivered and if she did go out she would only take a cab that would pick her up at her door.

She was in Lakeview.

Lakeview/Lincoln Park has crime rates that are lower than Toronto, Canada.
posted by srboisvert at 12:17 PM on October 8, 2015 [11 favorites]


There are plenty of Latino people and at least some black people - it ain't Palo Alto but for sure it's not Oakland either.

Fair enough -- I've just been on ND in a number of neighborhoods in different states, and I've mostly never failed to encounter at least occasionally the "this man was selling MAGAZINES DOOR-TO-DOOR in an OBVIOUS ATTEMPT to CASE MY HOME"-type nonsense in each one of them. I don't think the racism quotient in any of those neighborhoods was particularly above average, sadly.
posted by invitapriore at 12:18 PM on October 8, 2015


Yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to deny that there's plenty of straight-up racism as well as coded racism in addition to that weird strain of suburban paranoia going on all over NextDoor. For all I know all the local racists are on Yahoo Groups or something.
posted by GuyZero at 12:21 PM on October 8, 2015


I was living in a condo complex last year (renting) and was subscribed to the residents' daily mailing list. Everyone seemed nice and friendly when I walked past them, but the mailing list was another story - a hive of paranoia and racial fear. Trace smells of marijuana were everywhere and signs of the deterioration of the neighborhood. A man in his late twenties with a beard and a backpack was cause for alarm. Someone waiting for a friend would merit calling the police. Most didn't mention skin color outright - my favorite was "tan complexion" as a descriptor that skirts around just calling someone black - but it was obvious that this was a bunch of scared white people in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, protecting their little enclave.

Even when I was moving in, the two Hispanic guys from the moving company were questioned by a nosy white lady at the gate as they were moving me in - they were carrying boxes and had moving dollys, had a big moving truck parked right outside, and I was literally five feet away from them, clearly watching them and part of it. How much less suspicious could that scenario possibly be?

My senior citizen mom visited once and took a morning stroll through the complex. Someone (maybe the same lady?) stopped her and started pestering her with questions, asking for identification. Seriously? My mom can't even visit me and go for a walk on her own?
posted by naju at 12:22 PM on October 8, 2015 [6 favorites]


On Everyblock there was a woman who was posting about how she was now trapped in her apartment and would not go out for fear of crime. She had everything delivered and if she did go out she would only take a cab that would pick her up at her door.

This reads more like low-grade paranoia/mental illness to me, which is depressing and upsetting is a different way than accusing random black people of being criminals for the crime of being visible in public.
posted by GuyZero at 12:22 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


I use Nextdoor daily to keep abreast of developments in my neighborhood (about half of the residents are members) and I like it quite a bit because of the address gating (you need to be in the community to post to it, although you can see and respond to posts in neighboring communities if you have your settings that way) and because it's not indexed by Google and other search engines.

I think that Nextdoor is a tool and, as such, can be used for both good and evil and that it reflects the people who use it. The one time that someone in my Nextdoor community tried to start a "lookout" for people who "shouldn't be here" they got shot down so fast I almost felt bad for them. The original poster was rightfully challenged (and I was tremendously heartened to see just how many of my neighbors did this) as to what they meant by "shouldn't be in the community" and the result was a lengthy and sometimes heated discussion about racial profiling. The majority of people posting in the thread agreed that profiling outsiders was not something that should be done, particularly with Nextdoor. And we haven't seen a single post re profiling since. It really made me feel good about my neighbors and my community. (I'm not saying that the racism in my community has gone away of course, but I do think that the public calling-out and discussion on Nextdoor was useful in sending the message that profiling people because of their race and economic status was not going to be tolerated in the neighborhood group.)

But of course, if the majority of people in the neighborhood had felt that profiling was ok, the thread would have reflected this. You can argue that Nextdoor should actively moderate the communities (they don't do this currently - at least I've never seen a post by someone who works for the company), but as it stands, Nextdoor is only as good (or as bad) as the people who use it. I don't think that it is an innately racist service, however.
posted by longdaysjourney at 12:28 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've been a Nextdoor member for a few months but I haven't seen any evidence of racism (which I suppose is good).

It reads like a bulletin board at a community center - seeking a handyman, anybody want some moving boxes and a used bookshelf, that kind of thing. Kind of low-key and dull. No gun wielding maniacs or crazy people in evidence.
posted by theorique at 12:31 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


When I'm not a member, the neighborhood somehow feels safer, like the kind of place in which children can play unsupervised (and they frequently do!). When I'm subscribed, I'm constantly looking over my shoulder for muggers, creeps and criminals whenever I leave the house.

Yeah. I always skip past the local crime reports on my neighboorhood news blog for exactly this reason. It's not actionable information in any way, so it does me no good to read it, and just feeds stupid irrationalities. I know that, like all humans, I'm bad at judging likelihood of rare events, so I choose not to go down that road.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:36 PM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


GuyZero, that lawsuit link is sickening. Can someone file a lawsuit against the plaintiffs declaring them to be a public nuisance because they're such assholes?
posted by xedrik at 12:38 PM on October 8, 2015


I don't want to derail this thread, but the autistic/public nuisance story is actually considerably more complex. To wit, the child repeatedly assaulted neighbors, including punching a baby in the head, and the parents' offered solution was that their child should be able to roam unsupervised half the days, and all the other children in the neighborhood should be allowed out on the alternate days.
posted by tavella at 12:45 PM on October 8, 2015 [5 favorites]


Man, reading this thread I'm glad my neighborhood is minority white because trying to write these sorts of reports would be making the racists head spin.

Plus pot is legal here, so complaining about that will result in a 0% response rate.
posted by fiercekitten at 12:52 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh, I JUST rage-unsubscribed from Next Door a couple weeks ago -- you have to sign in to unsubscribe and FUCK IF I KNEW what password I signed up with so I kept putting off unsubscribing but in the meantime you continue to get all the e-mails from your "neighbors," which consisted of 10% city announcements about road construction or garbage pickup changes, and 90% CRAZY-ASS RACISTS COMPLAINING ABOUT MINORITY CHILDREN. I was sick to my stomach every time one popped up in my inbox before even seeing the subject line, since it was such a gross, vitriolic, unrelentingly racist space. Where people use their real names. It's horrific.

So I don't know if the city or Next Door is supposed to be providing some kind of moderation, but I am shocked and enraged that the city is using this as an official channel for communication, and pushing it to neighborhood associations, and it's just unrelentingly terrible. I mean it is literally the worst place I have ever been on the internet, and I've been to 4chan. It makes me feel terrible about living here. I haven't felt such unrelenting unhappiness about something since the mean girls in junior high. It is almost inexpressible how absolutely terrible this thing is; it pushes my weltschmerz right over into weltemorden.

I have been raising a minor stink about in local forums and speaking to friends on the city council and city staff, but I think perhaps I will escalate my complaints and make them more public.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:08 PM on October 8, 2015 [26 favorites]


Plus pot is legal here, so complaining about that will result in a 0% response rate.

It's not legal at the federal level for resident aliens FYI.
posted by srboisvert at 1:09 PM on October 8, 2015


Nextdoor's suggestions for dealing with problem users are amazingly naive.

"Be on the lookout for signs that you may be over posting such as being muted. Meanwhile, if you believe that someone else is over posting, send them a (polite) private message letting them know or post a general message to the newsfeed (without naming anyone specifically) reminding people of this guideline."

Like over-frequent posting is the primary problem to deal with and you should just go and confront people about it with your real name. Sure.

Also:

"But it's inappropriate to report suspicious activity in a way that focuses primarily on the appearance of those involved rather than their actions. See our article on Reporting suspicious activity to your neighbors for tips on how to do so in a constructive way."

Come on. Maybe this would have cut the mustard as site policy in 1998 but seriously.
posted by GuyZero at 1:14 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


The other day I was listening to a podcast (forgot which one) and one of the speakers said the new American motto may as well be I'm not here to make friends.

(My neighbors are a very friendly bunch but I have not looked at this website and I am not going to.)
posted by bukvich at 1:27 PM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


I wish there was a "Racism on Nextdoor" Tumblr people could share particularly egregious posts with. Organizing things like that has had a clarifying effect in the past, I think.
posted by Deoridhe at 1:27 PM on October 8, 2015 [5 favorites]


It's not Nextdoor, but my friends alerted me to this Facebook post that has turned into a giant drama over the past few days. If we're on the lookout for racist schadenfreude.
posted by naju at 1:37 PM on October 8, 2015


I am a member of mine but I try to only watch with one eye for fear I'm going to see something that makes me sad/angry, but so far the worst I've seen is the obsession with the recycling collection place in a nearby shopping center that is apparently some kind of blight (thanks to a hill, you can't even see it from the streets).

We do have a coyote that is more closely tracked than a Kardashian, and we had quite the kerfuffle over some sort of "All-Nude Maids" van that would drive/park around the neighborhood, apparently as an advertising tactic. Our neighborhood's most ardent activist eventually got into a scuffle with the driver, and people on NextDoor raised the money for his bail. The van hasn't been back since.

It's an extremely diverse neighborhood, and while most of the heavy posters are white I think they are aware they aren't alone there.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:43 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


I had never used Nextdoor prior to today, but this post made me curious about what my neighbors may be saying there (Salt Lake City). It feels like reading the minutes from a vaguely racist HOA meeting--so many busybodies. People were actively advocating the practice of confronting unfamiliar people (in a friendly way) to ask if they live around here, and to ask to take their picture for "the neighborhood scrapbook."
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 1:46 PM on October 8, 2015 [5 favorites]


Paranoia is as American as motherhood and apple pie.
posted by GuyZero at 2:15 PM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


i think honestly part of the problem is that there are probably racists there, but the other half of people posting this are people who may not be racists, but their concepts of what are normal amounts of, say, noise or loitering, are calibrated to white, middle class neighborhoods, and so anything outside of that will ping as a threat or nuisance. (For example, the drum circle referenced)
posted by corb at 2:38 PM on October 8, 2015


their concepts of what are normal amounts of, say, noise or loitering, are calibrated to white, middle class neighborhoods

Growing up in small-town Ontario where it's basically all white & middle-class, you may (or may not) be surprised to hear that there's actually a pretty wide variety of behaviours among that little slice of people!

Many of the people who post these complaints are misanthropic and/or slightly paranoid and simply dislike everything.

I know this sounds like #notallwhitepeople and while there's definitely a racist part to it, if there were nothing but white people there would still be complaints.
posted by GuyZero at 2:44 PM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


My pastor joined Nextdoor solely so that when people posted "OMG there's a black teenager skulking around in the hedges!" she could say "That's my son. He's seven, and he lives here."
posted by KathrynT at 2:52 PM on October 8, 2015 [25 favorites]


if there were nothing but white people there would still be complaints.

Sure, but I doubt there would be anywhere near as many and/or the threshold to trigger a BE ON THE LOOKOUT!!11! message would be much higher than someone over the age of four SSWB, DWB, WWB, LINWB, DGSWB, or MASWWB.

(For those of you playing along at home, that's Standing Somewhere While Black, Driving While Black, Walking While Black, Living In Neighborhood While Black, Delivering Goods or Services While Black or Making Any Sound Whatsoever While Black.)
posted by lord_wolf at 3:03 PM on October 8, 2015 [7 favorites]


i think honestly part of the problem is that there are probably racists there, but the other half of people posting this are people who may not be racists, but their concepts of what are normal amounts of, say, noise or loitering, are calibrated to white, middle class neighborhoods

Here is my accounting of the behaviors from the article that people found suspicious:
  • walking down the street
  • driving a car
  • knocking on a door
  • delivering mail
  • noise in public parks and bars
  • being near bus stops
  • standing in "shadows"
  • making U-turns
  • hanging around outside businesses
  • wearing a hoodie
  • standing in one's own driveway
  • being in a shared garden space
  • talking on a cell phone while walking a dog
  • being inside a parked commercial van at 2am
  • knocking on a door looking for a friend
  • being visibly nervous
  • selling door-to-door
  • making noise and partying
  • drum circle
  • not picking up dog poop
I've underlined some items that I could maybe see causing a reasonable non-racist person to get the police involved, assuming that they're also doing so when the people who are engaging in those behaviors are white. Are there any I'm missing that simply don't happen in "white, middle class" neighborhoods? I live in one of those neighborhoods, and except for the drum circle, I think I've observed all of these. Are we to really believe that anything approaching "half" of the people applied these standards of behavior in a non-racially-biased way? And if it is just a question of their standards being improperly "calibrated", how long are we supposed to give them to recalibrate before we can accuse them of engaging in a selective, racist application of their rules about walking / loitering / making noise?
posted by tonycpsu at 3:22 PM on October 8, 2015 [6 favorites]


Selling door to door and knocking on a door looking for a friend actually triggers a lot of police calls ... especially for a woman or older person at home alone, that can feel threatening, and companies do not necessarily look for door to door salesmen without a "creepy" vibe. Door to door sales is obnoxiously common here and takes a stunning range of tactic, including weirdos who pretend like you're already friends and have a script that involves gaslighting you to that effect. I've been hit up several times by door to door scam artists who were later arrested, and not long ago we had a string of burglaries where they were casing residents by going door to door in the afternoon and then coming back after dark.

That said, the only one I have PERSONALLY called the police over was a young white woman who claimed, with no ID, to be from the census and started asking me a bunch of personal questions. It turned out she actually WAS from the census and the local census office got reprimanded for not training its fieldworkers or giving them credentials, who were wandering around scaring the bejeezus out of local residents in like fashion.

I've GONE door to door many times now for political races, and sometimes people call the cops on you, and around here the cops are pretty relaxed about it (you give them a copy of your literature and they move on). People really do not like strangers appearing at their door, especially old ladies who live alone. You use various strategies to appear legit and non-threatening, but again, some of these door to door salesmen are super sleazy.

No other place I've lived has had the same volume of door to door sales, or scams. It may be regional. I sort-of dread the first nice week of spring, when I will be visited by at least six people trying to sell me cable, lawn services, or a new roof.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:53 PM on October 8, 2015 [5 favorites]


Oh, sure, I've got no problem with door-to-door sales being added to the list, but would be highly suspicious of claims that complaints about it would be made in a race-neutral way.
posted by tonycpsu at 4:21 PM on October 8, 2015


People were actively advocating the practice of confronting unfamiliar people (in a friendly way) to ask if they live around here, and to ask to take their picture for "the neighborhood scrapbook."

"Ooh! I'm already in a scrapbook! Wow, my neighbors are so friendly!"
posted by naju at 4:44 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Can someone who uses that site clarify for me what non-creepy things that site is being used for that would require it to be walled off to non-members and non-locals?

I'm having a hard time thinking of any reason for making it private that doesn't involve something sketchy on the part of the members and the site itself.
posted by ernielundquist at 4:52 PM on October 8, 2015


It's just to drive page views. There's nothing on Nextdoor that wasn't on Yahoo Groups three years ago in our neighbourhood. It's bullshit, but meh, I need the local gossip.
posted by GuyZero at 4:53 PM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


When I talked about the white middle class, I was talking more like - okay, my husband grew up white, and I'm Hispanic. We have wildly, wildly different ideas for what constitutes acceptable neighborhood noise, where I'm like "as long as it's not actually loud enough to keep me awake I don't care if I hear music from three doors down" and he is like "I hear something from next door, is it music
posted by corb at 5:00 PM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Re the autistic case above, it went to court for discovery, and was sent back to mediation a couple weeks ago. Here's a report that is a little less biased than the advocacy group.

Re Nextdoor: we get postcards for it all the time, but I've never bothered. I can tell by the neighbors political placards that I'm not going to want to hear what they think about anything. Also, I'm probably the people they complain about.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 5:08 PM on October 8, 2015


We have wildly, wildly different ideas for what constitutes acceptable neighborhood noise

Sure, and a vast majority of the behaviors called out in the piece have nothing to do with noise, and happen routinely in every neighborhood, so zeroing in on the one that does to make statements about how half of the posters' hearts are probably in the right place seems questionable.
posted by tonycpsu at 5:12 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


They'd get more page views if they didn't restrict access, though. It looks like the site itself is collecting a whole lot of information about people by making them sign up for accounts, but from a user standpoint, I can't think of a legitimate reason to restrict views to members.
posted by ernielundquist at 5:15 PM on October 8, 2015


Can someone who uses that site clarify for me what non-creepy things that site is being used for that would require it to be walled off to non-members and non-locals?
I just signed up because I was curious. Honestly, there's nothing that I think couldn't be public. The most recent things are:

-an announcement from the city about trash pickup

-a discussion of this article. People seem to agree that it's mostly not a problem on our site but that it's something to watch out for.

-a discussion of people breaking into cars. I didn't see any dog-whistles.

-an announcement about a candidate forum for city council

-someone looking for reclaimed wood boards

-someone who no longer needs her nanny and wants to recommend her to other families

-more car break-ins

-a kitty for adoption

Basically, it's mostly stuff that could be on Craigslist. Although for sheer racist bullshit, you can't beat Craigslist rants and raves, which is really appalling.

There's a twitter account here that tweets out the most outrageous things from the local online police blotter, and there really are a lot of calls that are basically "there is a black man sitting in a car and I think he's up to no good." It's really eye-opening to realize how often people call the cops literally because there are black people sitting around minding their own business. Also, people call the cops all the time because they think they smell marijuana. Who does that?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:15 PM on October 8, 2015 [5 favorites]


ernielundquist: "Can someone who uses that site clarify for me what non-creepy things that site is being used for that would require it to be walled off to non-members and non-locals? "

Yeah, in theory it lets you target announcements by neighborhood and extend neighborhood association sorts of news and announcements. I think the idea is that by limiting it to people who actually live in the neighborhood, you prevent commercial spam and address-harvesting and so on. The 10% of stuff that wasn't randos bitching about other people existing was 1) city-wide announcements; 2) area-specific announcements, such as "work being done on this street in your neighborhood" or "nearby water main break" or "these three neighborhoods will be street cleaned" or whatever, and the city could select which neighborhoods to send the messages to; and 3) neighborhood association business, like announcements of neighborhood meetings, neighborhood clean-up day, dumpster days, and neighborhood garage sales.

You can then optionally see what's going on in other neighborhoods in your city, or just get messages and chatter from your own neighborhood.

It's actually a pretty good idea in theory, being able to collect all that sort of city and neighborhood business under one umbrella and having tools useful to city officials and neighborhood leaders. But in practice, since there is zero moderation, it turns ugly and useless fairly quickly. If I could have signed up for a "channel" for official city and neighborhood business that was vetted by someone with some accountability, and then there were a separate "channel" I could ignore that was full of the gossip and nasty stuff, I would have just ignored the gossip channel and gotten some real use out of the official channel. But since it's by neighborhood ... back to scanning the city council meeting minutes and hoping important neighborhood news will turn up on facebook.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:19 PM on October 8, 2015 [4 favorites]


The problem, incidentally, is that NextDoor is trying to reach critical mass as a neighborhood social networking tool, rather than just as a tool for local government communication. So they want you to see and engage with ALL the posts, instead of just what's of interest to you, and people arguing with each other over racism builds their network effect.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:20 PM on October 8, 2015


It blew my mind to move to California and read all my neighbors freaking the fuck out over what they think is trace smells of marijuana wafting in the air in the park nearby, ready to call 9-1-1 and worrying about their kids getting contact highs. Medical marijuana is legal here so I expected people to be pretty chill about it. But nope.
posted by naju at 6:07 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh, it can get much worse than this. Off the top of my head and using existing technology:

– Users could be encouraged to video people and cars in their neighbourhood. Face- and symbol- matching technology will identify them and create a tagged record of who went where.

– Speaking of tags, users could attach their own tags, and vote on tags applied by other people. You'd end up with community ratings of people in the neighbourhood, or people just passing through.

– In fact you can automate a lot of this: most people now carry individually-identifiable radio sources. So you can make security cameras that will video, upload, and tag images of passersby.

So let's suppose that someone is walking around in a suspicious colour way. A few people tag the stranger as suspicious, and an alert goes up to let people know when the stranger is passing by. If the stranger accumulates enough negative tags then the police get alerted, and here's the clever bit: the police get rated on their response time.

So you've effectively got a gated community without walls! It would be a genuinely effective crime-fighting measure, because you'd have something approaching continuous personal surveillance of the area. And, it would mean the end of personal anonymity, because information would get shared between neighbourhoods. . No matter where you go or what you do, total strangers would be able to point their camera at you and check how you've been tagged.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:15 PM on October 8, 2015 [8 favorites]


My Oakland neighbors are pretty good about pushing back on stupid racist stuff- right now the top post is someone saying, "hey, I saw someone walking down the street with a ton of fishing stuff, so if you're missing any I know where it went" and people are responding by saying "it is NOT AGAINST THE LAW TO WALK WITH FISHING STUFF!" so people in this part of Oakland are definitely more conscious of this kind of thing. Sometimes I see threads from other neighborhoods and it makes me really glad I don't live there.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:01 PM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Oh, and like odinsdream mentions above, I'm REALLY freaked out by the neighbors who consistently talk about using their handgun to protect themselves from every perceived threat, no matter how minor or imagined. I'm sure it's 95% bluster, but mindset behind that really disturbs me.

Oh gawd this. We're too white where I live for there to be black people to be suspicious about. But we have some people who really want to shoot something. Right now it's the local coyote that everyone seems to think will eat their pets. Someone called the police to confirm it was okay to shoot it, and the answer of "only if you are defending yourself or pet from attack" to "yay, coyote shooting!" I've lived her for 15 years a) the coyotes have been here the entire time and b) I'm not sure what they're going to think when they find out its a pack of coyotes, not a single animal.

I'm on a facebook group for a fairly liberal part of Milwaukee, WI. We had intended to move there, so I joined to get a sense of the locals and never left. I can't count the number of normally liberal and progressive people that will take to racial profiling. In a way it's worse, because you get a lot of people saying "We know what racial profiling is and how harmful it is, and this is different." How is posting a warning about two suspicious black kids walking in in an alley not racial profiling?
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:07 PM on October 8, 2015 [4 favorites]


Yep, this is all very familiar. I don't use Nextdoor -- I tried once and got instantly nauseated by the constant updates from neighborhood busybodies and scolds, and I disconnected myself. But the "neighborhood watch" and "Hip [insert community here]" Facebook pages for my vicinity are nothing more than a social-network cover for undiluted racism, xenophobia, and paranoia. It's not to say that crimes don't occur. They do. But the levels to which people will go to target anyone who remotely seems different or dissonant from the accepted norm -- more often than not, the target is young black men, or, to use their parlance, "thugs" -- is unbelievable. And the instant hysteria that accompanies any suggestion that these folks might be overreacting, to say nothing of profiling people of color, is instantly and ruthlessly ganged up on and quashed, with an unmatched degree of spitting, fervid, self-righteous rage.
posted by blucevalo at 10:16 PM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


Let me add: I meant to say the levels to which white people will go. Because, clearly and unambiguously, it's almost always white people who are doing this shit.
posted by blucevalo at 10:18 PM on October 8, 2015 [4 favorites]


The problem, incidentally, is that NextDoor is trying to reach critical mass as a neighborhood social networking tool, rather than just as a tool for local government communication. So they want you to see and engage with ALL the posts, instead of just what's of interest to you, and people arguing with each other over racism builds their network effect.

And then there is this. Social media, disrupters, startups all seem to be hell bent on getting adoption by any means, and put the rules in place later to fix the problems. But they know from early on that the problem is there, and they leave it to generate interest. While it's certainly not unique to Nextdoor (I'm looking at you, facebook video!)

So great job you guys! You made the Internet a worse place by letting people be racist twats.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 12:49 AM on October 9, 2015


My neighborhood's Nextdoor seems to be mostly posts from nearby neighborhoods, but it does look pretty useful. More garage sale posts and service recommendation requests than crime reports. I'd been looking for tailor recommendations!
posted by asperity at 8:59 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was so excited when a friendly woman I met while walking the dogs in our new neighborhood invited me to NextDoor. Then I joined. It's disgusting. I'm angry at all of the paranoid racists on there for being crazy paranoid racists. And I'm angry at the friendly woman for thinking I was one of them because I'm white, too. Although I can't say I'm surprised. I live in St. Louis and thanks to last year's events the whole world now knows what a segregated backwater it is.
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 11:44 AM on October 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


My wife told me that she thought that having your real name and the street that you live on would have some kind of check on people showing their true asshole nature, but you would not believe the vitriol I got after posting a pro-Democratic candidate event a few weeks ago. I thought it was a pretty benign "we are having a flyering event here at date/time... please join us on Facebook" post, but then one lady came out and said that she didn't think it was appropriate, then someone else was like 'if you don't like it, move on' and then the first lady's husband came on and started calling people hacks, and then it was back and forth, back and forth. My wife asked me to delete the post, which I resisted because I wanted to leave it as a public record to those who were out of line and those who were being reasonable. I did eventually end the discussion after I figured out you could do that, but there has been a lot of the police blotter posting regarding shootings and the like in parts of the neighborhood.

To be fair, my neighborhood on NextDoor is named after a street named after a city in Texas, and was determined that the person complaining about my original post was under the impression that I was a Texas political operative posting on a SE Virginia neighborhood board. That still doesn't excuse him from being a dick to everyone else though.
posted by daHIFI at 11:46 AM on October 9, 2015


I used to be on Everyblock and I had to stop ever going there because of the jaw dropping racism on display (typical example of a topic up for discussion: "Why can't I say n****? Black people do all the time!"). And this is in a super diverse super friendly to everyone neighborhood in in an ultra-Democratic city. Where do all of these people come from? I just want to know if there are any good yard sales coming up for cryin' out loud! But it seems normal people do not use neighborhood websites.
posted by Jess the Mess at 11:46 AM on October 9, 2015


I can't count the number of normally liberal and progressive people that will take to racial profiling.

"It's nothing racial ... I'm just talking about a good neighborhood for raising kids, that's all."

"It's nothing racial ... I'm just talking about good schools, that's all."

"It's nothing racial ... I'm just talking about crime rates, that's all."

Joe Sobran, the conservative writer, once joked that "In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan".
posted by theorique at 12:02 PM on October 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


Update: the car break-in discussion is now full of stupid, overwrought language about how we don't feel safe in our own communities and people will be breaking into houses next, and now there's a whole separate discussion of the overwrought language and whether we should be more careful about how we talk about crime. I don't know if the overwrought language is really dog-whistle-y, but you could argue that any overwrought discussion of crime is dog-whistle-y in my community.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:41 PM on October 18, 2015






It's good that they're having that meeting, but the racist behavior facilitated by their program is intrinsic to their model. I'm pretty sure they're aware of this, because their website basically tells people how to get away with racial profiling:
Communicating suspicious behavior to your neighbors
[...] Please keep in mind that Nextdoor has a Guideline against posting messages that are perceived as discriminatory or profiling, so while it's ideal to provide a detailed description, the focus of your report needs to be on the person's actions, rather than their appearance. In particular, be sure that the subject line of your post focuses on the person's actions rather than their appearance or race.
and
What do you mean by "discriminatory" or "profiling"?
[...] It's fine to report suspicious activity to your neighbors that begins with a description of the suspicious activity and then describes the appearance of the people involved (a description that might include their gender, age, race, or ethnicity). But it's inappropriate to report suspicious activity in a way that focuses primarily on the appearance of those involved rather than their actions.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:49 PM on October 29, 2015


It sounds like it's specifically saying don't racially profile - although it doesn't specify any consequences for doing so, so it feels more like a polite suggestion than a command. It suggests that mentioning race isn't necessarily forbidden, but don't be weird about it. Which seems like a fairly authentic way that people deal with / talk about race - awkwardly, uncomfortably.
posted by theorique at 5:33 PM on October 29, 2015


Nextdoor says don't post messages that are perceived as discriminatory or profiling. They don't say "don't profile, don't discriminate." Not that a suggestion would be worth much, as you say. Like other social media, this app lowers the barrier to engaging in racist and hateful behavior, and encourages swarming and groupthink. Nextdoor's response to this isn't to provide tools that track or discourage racism; instead it tells people how to avoid the appearance of it.

So reports that say "youths loitering near parked cars" or "kids from out of the neighbourhood are swarming the local pool" are fine, even if they were only called out because they were Black. Similarly, the FAQ tells you not to lead with the subject's appearance or to focus on it. It's trivial to get around that: a report that says "threatening behavior: a large African-American male was walking into businesses, looking around then walking out" would be fine, even if it's basically talking about someone browsing while he's waiting for his partner. A bunch of reports like those are definitely racist in effect, even if it's impossible to point to the racist motive behind any single one of them.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:15 PM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


NextDoor in the news again - controversy about whether people who steal stuff should be referred to as "criminals".
posted by theorique at 7:29 AM on October 31, 2015


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