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Checking out of Airbnb while black gets the police called on you apparently

Indus

Indus

Lifer
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/07/us/airbnb-police-called-trnd/index.html

At first, Kelly Fyffe-Marshall's stay in Rialto, California, was ending pretty normally. She and her four friends -- three of them black women -- checked out of their Airbnb rental and dragged their luggage to their vehicle.

Then things got weird.

Seven police cars showed up. The neighborhood was seemingly locked down.

Then things got scary.

The police told Fyffe-Marshall and her friends to put their hands in the air, and then informed them a helicopter was tracking them.

Why all the commotion?

Someone had called the police on them, thinking they might be burglars.

A police sergeant showed up, Fyffe-Marshall says in her account, and said he didn't know what Airbnb was.

The group showed the police their booking confirmations and phoned the home's landlord to convince police they were telling the truth.

The entire episode lasted a frustratingly long 45 minutes, she said.

"We have been dealing with different emotions and you want to laugh about this but it's not funny," she wrote.

"The trauma is real. I've been angry, frustrated and sad. I was later detained at the airport. This is insanity."

Rialto Police Lt. Dean Hardin told CNN the person who called police was an elderly white woman, and she did not recognize the women as being her neighbors. Hardin could not speak to the allegation the group was targeted due to their race.

"I cannot get into the caller's head, beyond that she thought she was seeing a crime," Hardin said.





In California? Wow! I thought it was such a progressive state!

That fear is gonna give the old lady a heart attack!
 
Well to be honest about it. If I saw five strangers coming out of my neighbors house with baggage and i didn't know who they were I would call the police regardless of what race they were. It is called being a good neighbor. In this case three of them happened to be black. I think to just assume racism is being extremely stupid.

The home owner should have let the neighbors in on the Airbnb gig and this wouldn't have happened.
 
The lady sees that her neighbor isn’t home but sees a bunch of people coming out of their house carrying stuff, I don’t think she did anything wrong.
 
pcgeek11 said:
Well to be honest about it. If I saw five strangers coming out of my neighbors house with baggage and i didn't know who they were I would call the police regardless of what race they were. It is called being a good neighbor. In this case three of them happened to be black. I think to just assume racism is being extremely stupid.

The home owner should have let the neighbors in on the Airbnb gig and this wouldn't have happened.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I agree with this.

If you're going to be a douche and AirBnB your place, at least give your neighbors a heads-up...then again the point may be that you don't want them to know due to town/county laws against doing this.
 
Cases like this where no clear overt racism is demonstrable yet plausible are a challenge. I would hope that you would agree @pcgeek11 and @zinfamous that black people are subjected to these kinds of things at very disparate rates and that such a thing is a big societal problem.
 
So Granny woke up and looked out her window and lost her shit. We don't know if this is the first time this property was rented out or how long the folks who were temporally detained had been staying there.
 
It might well not be racism at all, but unfortunately the black family involved can't be blamed for thinking it might be. Real shame the neighbour didn't have the chance to first call the cops on a white family - that would have made it all much clearer for everyone.

Agree with those who say the homeowner should have told their neighbours they were doing AirBnB. If there are going to be strangers constantly coming-and-going shouldn't the neighbours be warned? But isn't that part of the problem with AirBnB? If a residential property were changing use and becoming a hotel or a shop or something, I would have though there would be 'zoning' issues and it would have to be publicly announced, because running a business is a public thing.

Seems like this is just another one of the problems thrown up by AirBnB/Uber type business models that seem to exist in a legal grey zone.

Edit - actually, changed my mind slightly - given it was a _family_ and they had packed luggage, it does seem likely that racism was a factor - otherwise, would you not assume they were just friends/extended family of the home owner? But still, AirBnB itself is part of the issue.
 
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Clearly racism. Also is this the first time ever the listing was ever used? Unlikely. The first time a black person used it? Probably
 
HomerJS said:
You tell me if this looks like your typical thug?
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10160498802620121
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If you've lived in this world long enough you know that looks don't mean some doesn't commit a crime.

I'm not saying the lady that called the police was right in this as she was totally wrong but saying someone is innocent of something because of how they "look" should never factor into anything. It's part of why rich white people get away with so much stuff, because people think they don't "look" like a typical criminal.
 
interchange said:
Cases like this where no clear overt racism is demonstrable yet plausible are a challenge. I would hope that you would agree @pcgeek11 and @zinfamous that black people are subjected to these kinds of things at very disparate rates and that such a thing is a big societal problem.
Click to expand...

Oh I absolutely agree with that. While I think it is plausible to assume that this was Granny's thinking, it's likely difficult to prove.

It seems to me that the central issue in this story is what seems to be a police overreaction to the call: shut down the street, multiple squad cars, helicopter, etc--and not so much Granny calling it in.
 
zerocool84 said:
If you've lived in this world long enough you know that looks don't mean some doesn't commit a crime.

I'm not saying the lady that called the police was right in this as she was totally wrong but saying someone is innocent of something because of how they "look" should never factor into anything. It's part of why rich white people get away with so much stuff, because people think they don't "look" like a typical criminal.
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Oh I don't know. Black people are already assumed guilty because of how they look. Why can't it work for innocent. Hmm dressed nice, carrying packed luggage and driving an Infiniti.
 
If you think a family casually hauling luggage out of a home amounts to burglars... yeah, there's a degree of racism involved. It's strange if you've never heard of the concept of Airbnb, but c'mon -- burglars don't recruit their family and take their sweet time offloading things in daylight.

As for the police? Well, that's tricky -- American police have a bad habit of overreacting to everything. Wouldn't rule out racist behavior, but I think a lot of that could stem from the report (something tells me the 911 call didn't provide an accurate description of the family).
 
zinfamous said:
Oh I absolutely agree with that. While I think it is plausible to assume that this was Granny's thinking, it's likely difficult to prove.

It seems to me that the central issue in this story is what seems to be a police overreaction to the call: shut down the street, multiple squad cars, helicopter, etc--and not so much Granny calling it in.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's ridiculous. If I called in my neighborhood for something like that I'd be lucky to see a cop car in the next half hour.
 
zinfamous said:
Oh I absolutely agree with that. While I think it is plausible to assume that this was Granny's thinking, it's likely difficult to prove.

It seems to me that the central issue in this story is what seems to be a police overreaction to the call: shut down the street, multiple squad cars, helicopter, etc--and not so much Granny calling it in.
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That is also important, although it is separate as the police were going to respond somehow anyway. Your observation mirrors my thinking about many police shootings we see. Often it seems the response from police creates an environment where shooting is a much more likely outcome. I think some cases need evaluation as to whether the magnitude of response was ideal and if race played a role in choosing it.

As an analogy, I had an attending in med school once muse to me that a patient seeing a doctor in an office for abdominal pain will get an exam. That same patient going to an urgent care will also get lab work. And that same patient going to an ED will also get a CT scan. Each may be an indicated intervention, but the only reason they were chosen was availability and norms of the environment. At some point we have to be accountable for the environments we create and our interventions being chosen as a result of availability and environmental norms.
 
zinfamous said:
Yeah, I agree with this.

If you're going to be a douche and AirBnB your place, at least give your neighbors a heads-up...then again the point may be that you don't want them to know due to town/county laws against doing this.
Click to expand...
I'll bet it was prohibited by the HOA covenant so the owner kept a lid on it.
 
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