“Hello, 911? There’s a black woman asleep in my dorm common room, surrounded by the accouterments of a college student, and I need you to send the police right away. … Yes, I am Sarah Braasch. Please hurry.”
Y’all, we just went over this.
Do not call the cops on people of color because they’re at your park and you don’t want them there.
A white woman called the police on a black family at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California, last month while they were setting up for a day at the park.
Their crime, according to the unidentified woman, was barbecuing in one of the park’s designated barbecue zones using a charcoal grill.
[…]
[Grill-user Onsayo] Abram told the San Francisco Chronicle the woman began arguing with him about his grill being illegal while he was setting it up.
“I proceed to tell her, ‘Hey, there’s not a posted sign. I believe I’m in the correct area. Go on about your day and leave me alone,'” Abram told the newspaper. “So she said, ‘No, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I’m gonna need you to shut this down, or I’m gonna call the police.'”
Lake Merritt has six designated barbecue zones — three that permit charcoal grills and three designated for “non-charcoal portable grills,” according to the Oakland city website. The family was in a barbecue-designated area, but had a charcoal grill in a “non-charcoal” zone.
[…]
“Why are you so bent out of shape over them being here?” [barbecue attendee Michelle] Snider asked the woman, as heard in the video below.
“Because it causes extra money from our city to do things when children get injured because of improperly disposed coals,” the woman replied.
Eventually, the woman walked to meet police officers at a nearby convenience store and began to cry, saying she was being harassed. Snider followed her to the police, asking for the woman to return a card that she says the woman took from her.
(Bonus points for strategic deployment of White Lady Tears.)
If they’re in a grilling area but not that kind of grilling area, don’t call the cops on them. If you aren’t the actual Barbecue Grill Police, don’t call the actual cops on them. And if you’re the one being the asshole, definitely don’t call the cops on them.
Do not call the cops on them because they’re in your dorm and you don’t want them there.
In what is becoming an all-too familiar episode, a black Yale University graduate student was interrogated by campus police officers early Tuesday after a white student found her sleeping in a common room of their dorm and called police.
[…]
According to [student Lolade] Siyonbola, she was working on a paper in the Hall of Graduate Studies when she fell asleep in a common room. Another female student came in, turned on the lights and told her, “You’re not supposed to be sleeping here. I’m going to call the police.”
Siyonbola pulled out her phone and recorded 54 seconds of a hallway encounter with the unidentified student, who told her, “I have every right to call the police. You cannot sleep in that room.”
After two white police officers arrived and began questioning her in a stairwell, Siyonbola posted 17 minutes of their encounter to Facebook Live.
When Siyonbola asked them about the complaint, one officer said, “She called us (and) said there’s somebody who appeared they weren’t … where they were supposed to be.”
The 34-year-old grad student in African studies unlocked her dorm-room door in front of police to show that she lived there, but they still asked for her ID. “You’re in a Yale building and we need to make sure that you belong here,” the other officer told her.
After some hesitation, Siyonbola handed her ID over. “I really don’t know if there’s a justification for you actually being in the building,” she told the officers, saying she needed to get back to working on her paper.
[…]
The officers in the dorm admonished the student who called police, saying Siyonbola had every right to be present, according to Kimberly Goff-Crews, Yale’s vice president for Student Life.
If they’re asleep, surrounded by papers and a computer, in the common room of a dorm — which might be one of the world’s least efficient ways to gain access to a college dorm for nefarious purposes, if that’s what you think they’re up to — and doing something that college students have done pretty much for as long as there have been colleges, don’t call the cops on them.
Except there wasn’t any chance of that not happening, because Sarah Braasch — the Yale philosophy doctoral student who raised the alarm — has a history of not liking black people in her dorm. Back in February, she called the cops on fellow student Reneson Jean-Louis for the crime of black-in-dorm-being. He was in the Dorm of Doom to attend a meeting with, in fact, Lolade Siyonbola. He actually rode the elevator to the 12th floor with Braasch, found himself lost, and asked Braasch for directions to the Common Room of Doom, which she had just exited. So she blocked the door, harangued him, told him he didn’t belong there and was making her uncomfortable, and then fucked off to call the cops.
Fun facts about Sarah Braasch: She already has two engineering degrees, a law degree, and a master’s degree in philosophy (to “to address the sub-human legal status of the world’s women at the source, the philosophical foundations of law”) and is now working on her philosophy Ph.D. She once won a middle-school debate about slavery by arguing that some enslaved people liked being enslaved. She is “to address the sub-human legal status of the world’s women at the source, the philosophical foundations of law” who supports banning burqas. She is opposed to hate crime legislation. And she refers to her time as a Jehovah’s Witness as slavery, saying, “I was a slave who extolled the virtues of being a slave. I was a slave who insisted that I had chosen slavery of my own free will, of my own volition,” but Sal, I thought you said choosing slavery was a good thing?
So confusing, Sarah.
So now we have #NappingWhileBlack and #CookingOutWhileBlack to add to #WaitingWhileBlack and #ShoppingWhileBlack and #GolfingWhileBlack and #WorkingOutWhileBlack and #NotWavingWhileBlack, so I guess it’s a good thing Twitter bumped its character limit up to 280. Either Yale police are going to have to start asking, “Is this Sarah Braasch?” every time a woman calls to report a black person breathing her oxygen, or while women, you’re going to have to stop calling the cops on people of color. Or both! You know what, let’s go with both.