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An African American politician in Oregon, who made news last year after she said she was racially profiled while campaigning, organized a new type of sit-in protest for today at a local mall after she said her daughter experienced the same thing at the hands of a mall cop while she sat in a parked car.
According to The Oregonian, State Rep. Janelle Bynum explained that last Friday her 17-year-old daughter, Christine, along with her two friends were shooed away from the Clackamas Town Center in Happy Valley when they sat in a car figuring what to do when one of the girls couldn’t get a ticket for an R-rated movie because she forgot her ID.
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“They were in the car when a mall cop parked and walked up to them and said they were sitting too long and loitering. They didn’t even know what the word meant. But they knew they had been profiled. And for what???” Bynum wrote on Facebook hours after the incident.
So Bynum organized a ‘Loiter-in for Chrissy’ event on Facebook and asked people to converge on the mall and sit in their cars, the food court and various places at the mall to see if they too would get approached and asked to vacate the premises.
“Sit in the food court, sit in your car on the phone, sit on the benches. Report your experience here,” she wrote on the Facebook post.
Bynum has followed up on her Facebook page to slam the mall manager who she said sent her what felt like a “very cold” message.
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“It is as if he is “gathering information” from his team to referee the truth with my daughter, when in fact, there will be multiple truths. This is what people don’t understand about discrimination. You can be vigilant about criminal activity while disproportionately and illegally targeting certain people based on race. It’s called collateral damage,” she said.
But the mall’s senior general manager, Dennis Curtis, said in a statement that the facility’s loitering policy is for safety.
“Our highest priority is the safety and well-being of our guests, retailers and everyone who visits our property,” Curtis said, according to The Oregonian. “Our policies, applicable in this case, are designed with that priority in mind.”
“These are the real threats we should be looking for,” she wrote. “Not unfairly targeting teens.”
Last year, Bynum was confronted by a deputy after a neighbor reported Bynum’s so-called “suspicious” door knocking activity while she was campaigning for re-election in her district about 20 minutes outside of Portland.
She said she was canvassing to find out what the needs are in the community. When an officer approached her, he reported that someone called 911 because she apparently alarmed someone who was disturbed by her tapping on her cellphone after each home visit. But she said she was simply taking notes on the community’s concerns.
Bynum then asked the officer if he would call the woman who made the 911 so she could talk to her.
“The officer called her, we talked and she did apologize,” Bynum said, without indicating the race of the caller.