-911.
What's the address of your emergency?
-We've been having a lot of burglaries
and break-ins around here lately.
I've never seen this guy before in the neighborhood.
-There is an African-American man, I am in Central Park,
he is recording me and threatening myself and my dog.
-Yeah, and illegally selling water without a permit.
-It's illegal to have a charcoal grill in the park here.
-We have this lady that's been, like, for no apparent reason,
is walking from house to house.
I have my own experience of having the police called on me.
As I continue to process this, what really went through my mind
was that I had failed and that my number had been called.
I was, you know, I remember that I was alone and I was out there
and I was doing the work that I felt I was called to do.
But somehow I had made a mistake.
I had done something to call attention to myself.
-Broadly speaking across most of the country,
it's against the law to make up a crime
and report that to the police.
But what some of these instances,
like what we saw in Central Park,
have done is they've spurred activists
and some lawmakers to say,
"You know, let's take this a little further."
-We are very good in this country
at telling other people how they should live their lives
and how they should act, how we preach a high standard,
but we still discriminate on the basis of color of skin.
That is the simple, painful truth.
-What they've proposed doing in New York
is adding a hate-crime enhancement to --
or making it possible to add a hate-crime enhancement to,
you know, calling 911 on someone because they're black or,
you know, for any other discriminatory reason.
And what that does is that then allows
for a more severe sentencing, and that's something
that they've also considered and passed in, to some extent,
or in varying ways so far, in Oregon, in New Jersey,
and in Washington state, as well.
-So I hoped that it would give black people in particular
some sense of comfort,
that they could move freely about this state
and have some avenue for redress.
-Oregon's took effect January 1st,
and the Washington law takes effect actually in a week,
on June 11th.
-Here's the piece of the bill that I think is most important.
It allows people to have a feedback circle
in their communities as to how they were harmed
by someone calling the police on them.
And so we shifted from a criminal misdemeanor
as the penalty for this to the ability
to face that person in court,
the ability to have, like, an arbitration session
where you sit down across from one another
and you tell that person how they hurt you.
-There was a lot of, you know, discussion on Twitter,
on social media, after the Central Park incident,
with people wondering or pointing out
that this ended, you know, fairly well -- right?
-- for the man who was bird-watching, right?
And in many other instances that we know of,
it doesn't end well for black men
when people call the police on them.
-The catalyst for this was a call to the police
over a $20 bill, right?
And so, you know, it kind of calls into question,
how dangerous are we?
How dangerous is it to have black people in your community?
Once people realize that all black people are asking for,
and brown people are asking for, and demanding
and have every right to demand is to be treated humanely.
That's it.