When it's dangerous to call the police.

If you saw a police car outside at noon, would it make you feel more or less safe? I suspect your answer would change depending on what neighborhood you're in. If I saw a police car right now, I'd be scared; if I saw two, I might consider strolling in the opposite direction. While I have no reason to be afraid of the police, I know they don't frequent this area unless they have a reason. And police don't often have happy, friendly reasons to be somewhere. I've occasionally mentioned to friends my unease around police. Most of those from my milieu are confused: do I have a warrant out for my arrest? Have I ever given the police a reason to be suspicious? No and no. I even come to a complete stop at stop signs!

But police, their real and important public safety role aside, can oftentimes be the enemy of law-abiding people, especially minorities and especially women. The NYT has a short but important piece on how laws created to deal with violent gangs have made battered women afraid to call the police against their abusers. 

These laws, often local, force landlords to evict tenants if the police have been called to a rental more than a certain number of times in a given time period -- they're labeled nuisance properties. The public policy intent seems sound enough: to keep peace in a neighborhood, kick out the misbehavers. Reasonable. But this assumes that the victim and the aggressor aren't in the same apartment or house. And once again, battered women are treated as complicit in the crimes against them. Can we repeat that a thousand times until it's clear to everyone? Battered women and men are the victims. Even if you invite someone into your home, if they beat you up, you are the victim. 

Also, I realize that forcing landlords to deal with problem tenants makes the police's job in one area easier. But people, even trouble people, cannot be disappeared: if they leave one neighborhood, they're moving into another one. Even if you concede that the people being evicted "deserve" it, any public policy has to face the fact that these people will end up causing trouble in a rougher, tougher neighborhood. And that's not fair to the people who, by economics alone and not because they themselves are "trouble", are forced into these rougher, tougher neighborhoods.