A follow-up on my earlier thread re: someone calling police because they thought a person sitting in their car, listening to the radio and reading on their phone was “suspicious”...

Some construction down the street from me. A couple officers stationed to block traffic...

1/

Told one the quick synopsis of the dumb call to police for sitting in a parked car.

Asked him what percentage of service calls are like that. Totally unnecessary calls where there was no real basis for calling police.

2/

His answer:

50%

Half the calls he responds to are not real reasons to have called the police.

Gave me some examples.

- Clearly race-driven “person looks out of place” calls

- Minor social infractions like someone walking the wrong way on a one-way path

3/

We have all kinds of problems to surface and fix and one of them is the way people engage police to respond to personal - and often racism-driven - discomfort absent any evidence of wrongdoing.

Half of all calls. That’s a very, very large number of unnecessary interactions.

4/4