On Saturday Ellie and I strolled up into Hayes Valley to meet Brandon and Cooper. We each bought 32oz bottles of beer and lazed on the grass at Alamo Square for an hour, hoping that one of the hipster kids playing chicken on a neighboring roof would fall to the sidewalk. We even left a useless voicemail for Laurence, who’s out of the states for a month.
On our way down the hill to Cooper’s place, I lead us down a side street in the projects named, innocently enough, Friendship Court. We were right about here when two cops parked on McAllister barked, “Are you tourists?”
“No. We’ve lived in SF for years.”
“Well, you look like tourists, and you shouldn’t be around here. Gang members like to shoot tourists because they tend not to testify. There have been two shootings just on this block in the last twenty hours.” He was stretching a bit, according to this SF Chronicle article, “2 shootings in 12 hours,” which indicates that the last shooting was at least 48 hours prior. The officer went on to say, “When you see police officers out here, it’s dangerous, and you need to go somewhere else.”
We humored him and continued on McAllister instead of reversing down Friendship Court, but were all downright perplexed about his advise. When we see police officers casually hanging out and drinking Starbucks, we should assume that we’re in grave danger and no one will protect us? We later agreed that his underlying point was probably, “you’re too white for this neighborhood.“