Bob Dylan (yes THE Bob Dylan) was picked up by a cop in New Jersey yesterday because people in the neighborhood in which he was walking thought he looked suspicious. And why did he look suspicious? Because he was white (emphasis added):
‘Residents called to complain there was an old scruffy man acting suspiciously,’ said officer Spencer. ‘It was an odd request because it was mid-afternoon. But it’s an ethnic Latin area and the residents felt he didn’t fit in.’
What’s amazing here is the police officer not batting an eye about it. With all the diversity training and anti-profiling training police go through, you’d think it might make a blip on his radar that the reaction of the “ethnic Latin” residents might be a bit, er, racially insensitive.
Of course, the big news was that some ignorant twenty-something policewoman didn’t know Bob Dylan by looks or even by name. But imagine if, say, Smokey Robinson were walking in an “ethnic white” neighborhood and residents called the cops because “he just didn’t fit in.” Would the cop explain it away as blithely as he did in the Dylan case? Not if he wants to keep his job, he wouldn’t.
UPDATE: Apparently this incident occurred about a week after the Henry Louis Gates incident in Cambridge, but is just now surfacing. It seems that Dylan, unlike the volatile Gates, cooperated with the police and told them he understood why they had to verify his identity. Some are speculating that this incident was buried by news media who knew it would reflect badly on Gates and Obama, who famously said the police in Cambridge “acted stupidly.”
