I hesitated to write this for fear of irking my neighbors.
But here goes — the messy truth about racial profiling in one Denver neighborhood.
On July 16, the same day a white woman in Cambridge, Mass., reported Henry Louis Gates Jr. on suspicion of breaking into his own home, someone on our block in central Denver called the cops about a black man in a do-rag. Officers responded in three police cars. They found the “suspect” on a ladder cleaning our gutters.
We weren’t home at the time.
Fearing that he was trying to rob us (you know, of the valuable chunks of dead leaves we stash covertly in our gutters), police threatened arrest if he didn’t leave our property and the neighborhood immediately.
“It happens,” sighed Ricky, the man on the ladder whose last name I never knew.
We’d met two days earlier when he stopped to ask if our windows needed cleaning. They did, pretty badly. So we agreed on a price.
Ricky returned the next day and went to work in the hot sun using white vinegar to squeegee more than a few seasons’ gunk off our windows. He hosed off our screens, careful to get every last cottonwood seed lodged in the tiny squares. He would stop every few minutes to spray the garden hose for our kids to run through.
Two hours later, Ricky knocked to say he was done. We invited him in for some ice water and food because he was thirsty, hungry and faced a long walk home.
He told us he’d grown up in Indiana, had lost his job building cattle stocks and was living with his family in a Colfax motel. He spends his days looking for odd jobs.
“This wasn’t my dream,” he said.
Ricky left with some cash in his pocket and an agreement to return the next day to clean our gutters.
Our neighbors apparently weren’t pleased about the freedom of his enterprise.
Some grumbled that evening about the stranger on our street. One was upset that he had knocked on her door. One found it conspicuous that he came and went on foot, without a truck or tools. Another wondered if he robbed some garages a few blocks away.
The detail of Ricky’s do-rag came up more than once — an indirect way to address the fact of his blackness in an area that’s mostly white.
Which brings me to why I hesitated to write this.
These are good people, my neighbors. They’ve hosted my family, encouraged our youngest to take his first steps and cheered on our oldest to ride without training wheels. They keep an eye out, always, for each other. That’s what you want in a community.
It’s through that lens that I can almost understand why someone called the cops on Ricky.
Racial profiling is a term we use mainly in terms of police, whom we expect to be trained and sensitive on racial issues. And, despite the assertion by the International Brotherhood of Police Officers that “we don’t need public safety officials across the county second-guessing themselves” post-Gatesgate, I’m pretty sure most of us agree that, in fact, we do.
If there was ever a time for second-guessing, it’s now, and not only among law enforcers. Anyone who lives anywhere that isn’t gated should expect strangers these days in their neighborhoods. And anyone who’s even half-awake in this recession should know people would rather be doing most anything else but knocking on doors and asking to wash windows or clean gutters.
We all make calls every day. Some of them warrant a second guess.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
