Palo Alto Police Chief Out
Crazy stuff’s been going on in Palo Alto over the past few weeks. The Chief of the Palo Alto police department just announced her departure through retirement. The announcement comes a few weeks after she, um, made it public that she directed her officers to, uh, institute police state procedures against any African Americans spotted in Palo Alto:
Palo Alto Police Chief Lynne Johnson announced her retirement Thursday, citing the strain of a controversy she sparked nearly a month ago with comments that appeared to endorse racial profiling.
Johnson said at an Oct. 30 public meeting at City Hall that she had directed officers to broadly question African American men while searching for suspects in a string of recent street robberies.
A previous article describes the Chief’s comments more specifically:
Johnson said she instructed her officers “to make contact with African-Americans in Palo Alto,” adding: “When our officers are out there and they see an African-American, in a congenial way, we want them to find out who they are.”
I suppose it’s possible that this was all just a big misunderstanding (I don’t believe that), but you just can’t say things like that, and if you do, you have to pay the price for your incredible mistake.
I lived in Palo Alto for just over a year - it’s basically a nice, friendly, upscale, white place. Like San Francisco, there are just not a lot of African-Americans there (maybe we’re starting to learn why). There are very clear racial lines - Palo Alto seems super-white and super-rich, and East Palo Alto - just a couple of miles away - primarily on the other side of Highway 101 - is much poorer and African-American and Latino and working class and blue collar, and though it’s only a couple of miles away, it’s really a world away. There’s a bike lane on University Avenue that can take you straight from East Palo Alto right into the heart of downtown Palo Alto. I’ve seen plenty of Latino men cycling down University - often barely avoiding death from speeding cars along that route (the speed limit is 25 MPH, which is good - that keeps cars below 40 MPH sometimes) - presumably from their homes in East Palo Alto to their jobs at all the restaurants in downtown Palo Alto.
A few years ago, riding while black got one African American man arrested:
Richard Tatum, a 61-year-old who works for the U.S. Department of Energy, spent his first and only night in jail several years ago after being stopped on his bicycle riding home from the post office. Police originally accused Tatum of riding a stolen bike, but later dropped the charges, he said.
I don’t doubt it’s a tough law enforcement problem, but when the decision has to be made about whether to by hyper-aggressive in finding property criminals versus trampling people’s rights - you always have to come down on the side of people’s rights. Always.
A few weeks ago I vented about getting harassed by an SFPD cop. In my case, the only reason I got harassed was because the officer didn’t know the law. And I was still seriously bent. It sucked, but I’m over it. On the whole, it’s not a big deal. But I can’t imagine what it must be like to get harassed for being the wrong color while riding my bike in the wrong neighborhood. Can you imagine getting arrested and spending the night in jail for daring to ride through ‘the white neighborhood’? It’s totally insane.
As for the law enforcement problem, I have an idea for the new Chief of Police in Palo Alto - put some officers on bikes. Even though it seems to be mainly a measure that police use to get better coverage in predominantly poor and/or high crime areas, it’s worth a try.
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