On a personal note

I belong to a neighborhood association. Every day I get e-mails from one of the neighbors in my area about this and that. One of the shops is having a sale, garbage pick-up date has changed, association meeting night is coming. This kind of stuff.

However, at least every other day I receive the "roll my eyes" e-mails from neighbors who are too stupid to lock their car doors and wake up to find their change or their cell phone that they left in plain sight in the car stolen. Or the ever vigilant neighbor who left his expensive mountain bike in the carport and came home to find it missing.

The first Christmas I ever lived in this neighborhood (about 5 years ago) I received an e-mail from a neighbor who had just wrapped all of his presents and placed them under the tree which was located in his formal living room right beside the front door right beside the sidewalk when he decided (I can't remember the reason) to step outside and go next door to his neighbors for a second. He left his front door open and went inside his neighbors house and lo and behold when he went back to his house, all of his presents were gone. Vanished into thin air. He told the police that he was only in his neighbors house for maybe 10 minutes. Can you believe that? Apparently 10 minutes is all it takes.

More than once I have had e-mails about neighbors who were getting ready to leave and they got to their vehicle (which was parked on the street next to the sidewalk) put their purse on the car (in one instance it was a briefcase) and then went back inside the house to do something. Well, surprise the hell out of me, but when they got back to the car their purse/briefcase was gone!

The types of e-mails that really make me roll my eyes are the following (I have pasted one of the e-mails below for you. I have gotten rid of the identifying parts (don't want to get sued, now do I?)

"At about 5:15 p.m. on Christmas eve I encountered a suspicious person walking on ??th St. S. at ?th Ave. S.
He was a black male about 6-foot-3, thin, wearing a backpack and cap of hat of some kind with dirty-looking dark clothing.
He had some kind of laser pointer or red-lensed light that he shined on the ground as I passed him.
I glanced back after I passed him and he was shining the light through the fence of the house he was passing by.
As my dog and I past him I said "hey." He answered in a very thuggish tone "what you say?"
After we got home I called the police and asked that they keep an eye out for him tonight.
Since so many people are away for the holidays I wanted to urge everyone to keep an eye on their houses and their neighbors and report any suspicious people or activity to the police."

Before I go any further, don't you love the "thuggish tone" part??

Now, first of all, let me explain the type of neighborhood that I live in. I live in an urban neighborhood that is very diverse. I would say maybe 30% of the residents are white but the rest are black & Hispanic. Also, if you step a block away from our neighborhood in any direction you are then in an almost entirely black neighborhood. I would say 99%. What does/should this tell anyone? It should tell anyone that on any given day or night you are going to find a black person walking down the street.

I have yet to get an e-mail from any of our neighbors telling us to be on the lookout for a white guy walking down the street. However, if you pull up the Sheriff Departments registered sex offender web page, you will find that most of the offenders are white. Shouldn't we be on the lookout for them too??

To be fair to these suburbanites who want to be cool and live in this urban neighborhood, there have been a lot of break-ins in his part of our neighborhood. Also, NO ONE should have to worry about someone else taking what doesn't belong to them. It's just not right and in my book, thieves should be hanged before murderers. (only because most of the time, murderers have a better excuse for their crime than a thief does). However, I still wonder about his right to call the police just because he noticed a black male walking down the damned street.

What do you think the police do when they get these calls? Most of our police down here are black which reflects the demographics down here. How do you think they feel when they continuously get these calls from the upper middle class white yuppies stating they saw a black male walking down their street and want him questioned?? I will say, they are very nice when they get these calls and they come out almost immediately and take a report and promise to drive around and keep their eyes out for them. (We really do have the nicest cops here). But how do you think they personally feel to get these calls? They are WAY better than I am because I am afraid if I got one of these calls and the caller told me the guy was just walking down the street, I'd remind them that they too were walking down the street. IT'S A PUBLIC STREET! ANYONE can walk on it at ANYTIME. Yeah, I wouldn't last long in a dispatch position.

Also, how can these people send out mass e-mails to everyone in the association telling them that they are such stupid idiots (yes, I realize that was redundant - I did it for emphasis) that they put valuable stuff in plain sight where anyone can grab them and run? And furthermore, if they didn't see who took their purse off their car or stole their mountain bike out of their carport how do they know it was a black male??? Honestly!

These kind of people need to live in the suburbs. They do not need to live in a mixed neighborhood. The houses over here are outrageously overpriced anyway. This guy lives in perhaps an 1200 square foot 3/1 house with a TINY backyard and no driveway and my bet is he could sell his house tomorrow for around $200K. In the mostly white suburbs he could get a house 3 times that size with a larger yard for the same amount.

So why does he live in a place he doesn't trust? Why does he put up with "black males" walking down his sidewalk? Who knows why these yo-yo's do what they do. Maybe they want to be the cool kids in their group?

I wonder if the black male called the police to report a suspicious white male walking down his street? I really wish they would start doing that. Do you think if these same people got the law called on them a few times and had to explain to the police what THEY were doing walking down that street at 5:15 in the afternoon, maybe they would think twice about doing it to others?

No, I think they would just be enraged at the audacity of the police and would immediately lodge a complaint with internal affairs over their callous treatment! They would NOT get it. These types never do. They have an entitlement frame of mind and nothing you could do or show them would ever change it. Sad, but true.

But that's just me.