A black legislator was campaigning door to door in his neighborhood. A constituent called 911



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State Representative, Janelle Bynum, Democrat of Oregon, was chatting with voters, typing notes on her mobile phone while she was knocking on the doors of her neighborhood just to outside Portland

. who is black – said a resident of Clackamas County neighborhood where she was seeking police on Tuesday, thinking that she was "suspicious" because she was going door to door and "was passing a lot time to tap on his cell phone after each house. "

" Living in the nasty streets of Clackamas !!! "she wrote in a Facebook post telling the incident, that the Root summed up in form hashtag: #CampaigningWhileBlack.

In recent months, blacks have been the subjects of 911 calls on banal and harmless activities such as napping. In the case of Bynum, to do his job.

Such emergency calls on non-urgent incidents, some of which were captured on video, raised questions about people calling the police not because of someone. but because of the race of the person

Thus, #LivingWhileBlack and its variations, # [insert action word here] WhileBlack, were born

The Washington Post could not reach Bynum on Thursday. But she told the Oregonian that she had just finished talking to someone in one of the 30 houses she was visiting on Tuesday afternoon and that she was not going to talk to anyone. she was typing notes on her conversations on her phone when she saw the sheriff's deputy in his patrol car. if she was selling something, and Bynum has come forward as a state legislator.

"It was just weird," she told the Oregonian. "It comes down to people who do not know their neighbors and people who are afraid in their neighborhoods, which is my job to help eradicate them." But in the end, it's important that people feel like they can talk. one to the other to help minimize misunderstandings. "

The Clackamas County Sheriff's Office did not respond to a request for comment." Bynum said in his Facebook post that the MP, whom she called Constable Campbell, "answered professionally."

The two took a selfie, and Bynum posted the photo on Facebook.

In her interview with the Oregonian, Bynum said that she told the MP that calling 911 for non-urgent incidents kept agents away from more urgent matters.

And, she said, it can also be dangerous for people like me. Sheriff's deputy to connect her with the 911 caller. The woman, who had not been identified, had already left the neighborhood.But Bynum wrote: "The officer l & # 39; 39 called, we talked and she apologized. "

Bynum was first elected to the House of Representatives of Oregon in 2016 and is a candidate for re-election this year. It represents District 51 of the House, which covers parts of Portland and its eastern suburbs.

There have been several other mundane activities seen with a suspicious objective in recent weeks.

For a 12-year-old black boy in Ohio, he mowed the lawn. For an 8-year-old girl in California, she sold water outside the building where she lives. And for two young black men from Philadelphia, he was sitting inside a Starbucks waiting for a person that they were supposed to meet.

In May, Lolade Siyonbola said that a postgraduate student was calling the police on her after she had gone to sleep in one of the school's common rooms. The campus police later said that Siyonbola "was entitled" to be in this room and that the incident was "not a police case".

That same month, the black sorority girls wore gloves and identical T-shirts. were reported to police while they were picking up trash on a Pennsylvania expressway. And Michael Hayes, a Memphis real estate investor, was leaving an abandoned house that he had a contract to inspect when a neighbor called the police and accused him of intruding

Last month, a group of blacks wrote to the House. The committees have called for a racial profiling hearing before the August holidays, reported Cleve R. Wootson Jr. of the Washington Post. One of them is Darren Martin, a former member of the Obama White House who said the neighbors had called the police while he was moving into his new apartment in Manhattan in April

"These blatant human rights affronts strangely recall some of the darkest chapters in the history of our nation, are the sad reality for Blacks in America," says the letter. "We ask that this new hearing broadens the attention of the police, as in previous hearings, to the examination of bias and profiling of public companies to private citizens."

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