From CNN:
San Francisco’s ‘CAREN Act,’ making racially biased 911 calls illegal, is one step closer to becoming a law
It may soon be illegal to make discriminatory, racially biased 911 calls in San Francisco.
The “CAREN Act” (Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies) was introduced in July at a San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting by Supervisor Shamann Walton.
The ordinance is one step closer to becoming a law. On Tuesday, the board unanimously passed the act on first read. Next week, the bill has to be voted on again by the board, and then it will be sent to Mayor London Breed to sign.
The ordinance’s name is a twist on “Karen,” the name social media gives people making racially biased 911 calls.
“Using 911 as a tool for your prejudice towards marginalized communities is unjust and wrong!” Bonta tweeted.
Racially motivated 911 calls aren’t a new occurrence across the country, in spite of a recent uptick following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed in police custody in Minneapolis.
Earlier this summer, a White hotel employee in North Carolina called the police on a guest, a Black woman and her children, who were using the hotel’s swimming pool. And in May, a White woman called 911 on a Black man who was birdwatching in New York’s Central Park.
Except I covered that last incident. Both parties in that incident were in the wrong. The black male victim admitted on social media that he baited dogs that were off-leash in the Ramble. The dishonest media only presented one side of that story so what entered the popular conscience is factually insufficient.
The Guardian broke this story with these examples:
San Francisco’s ‘Caren Act’ makes placing racist 911 calls a hate crime
Fed up with white people calling 911 about people of color selling water bottles, barbecuing or otherwise going about their lives, San Francisco leaders unanimously approved hate crime legislation giving the targets of those calls the ability to sue the caller.
The Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday on the Caution Against Racial and Exploitative Non-Emergencies Act, also known as the Caren legislation. It’s a nod to a popular meme using the name “Karen” to describe an entitled white woman whose actions stem from her privilege, such as using police to target people of color.
The “barbeque Becky” story that entered the popular conscience is also factually insufficient. The incident started because the black family was using a charcoal grill in an area of the park not designated as a charcoal-approved grilling zone during a fire advisory. The situation got out of hand, I’m not going to deny that, but when tens of thousands of acres and dozens of people die in wildfires in California every year, fire zones exist and should be obeyed for a reason.
The New York Daily News covers this story:
San Francisco ‘CAREN’ legislation aims to crack down on racist 911 calls about Black people
The San Francisco Human Rights Commission began work on the legislation in 2018, after the Black owner of a high-end lemonade stand had the cops called on him by people who assumed he was breaking into his own store.
NBC Bay Area has details of this story:
According to SFPD, officers were dispatched to the 800 block of Valencia Street around 7:36 a.m. on July 17 “on a call of a possible burglary in progress at a business.”
“The caller stated that the person was removing items from a small, open door,” SFPD said in a statement.
“Four officers responded to the scene and spoke to the person and determined he was the owner of the business. The entire encounter lasted less than three minutes,” the statement added. “While we have no say over who requests our services, we do have a say over how we respond. The men and women of SFPD are committed to providing safety with respect to all of the people of San Francisco. It is the duty of San Francisco Police to respond to calls for service and we believe our officers responded appropriately and with courtesy to this call.”
The body cam video shows an SFPD officer walking up to Stevenson and asking him, “Do you have something that shows that you own this place? Somebody called us saying that you’re breaking in … We’re just here to figure it out.”
Stevenson, dressed in a big jacket, hands over his ID to the officer, who asks him for the address of the storefront. He responds with the address, and the officer then asks him if he has a California ID, which Stevenson then hands over.
The officer also informs the others, “He has a key.” The officers leave the storefront after this exchange.
Property crime in San Franciso is off the charts, the highest in the state of California. If you park your car on a street in San Francisco, you can almost guarantee that a window will be smashed and the items inside stolen.
Some people call the police because they see someone they do not recognize removing items from a storefront before normal business hours. The incident lasts three minutes and nobody was hurt. Clearly, it’s racism and not people concerned about property crime in their city.
This reminds me of another story that I covered a little while ago.
A woman doesn’t know that her neighbors listed their home on AirBNB. She sees three strangers removing luggage from the house, after midnight, and calls the cops to report a suspected burglary.
Three strangers. Removing large items from the house. After midnight.
Again, the only motivation is racism and not a neighbor who did not know the house was an AirBNB thinking strangers coming out of a house while the owners were away after midnight with large items was suspicious.
The assumption in each and every one of these cases has been that to motivation was racism and that there were no mitigating circumstances at all that might have even initially justified a 9-11 call.
One of the key aspects of this bill is covered by USA Today:
The San Francisco legislation gives people the right to sue a 911 caller in civil court, and supporters hope it will make some think twice before turning to police. The discrimination need not be only racial; it can also be due to the person’s sex, age, religion, disability, gender identity, weight or height.
The legislation does not spell out the standards needed to sue. But it notes that qualifying calls are those that caused the person to feel harassed or embarrassed; damaged the person’s reputation or business prospects; or forced the person from an area where they had a lawful right to be.
The person who had 9-11 called on them can sue and the standards for what constitutes a 9-11 hate crime are not spelled out. I guarantee that the default assumption will be on the guilt of the caller.
It is plain as day that the purpose of this legislation is to deter people, especially white people, from calling the police.
We’ve gone from “see something say something” to “see something and you are a bigot who needs to shut the fuck up.”
Just like Prop 47 and San Francisco police being ordered to not respond to non-criminal complaints such as homelessness, vagrancy, and suspected mental illness issues, this bill is just another Progressive tool to hamstring police.
Then again, at the rate at which police are quitting in San Francisco, there it might not be worth calling 9-11 in the first place.
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