Profiling by Proxy: Incidents, Laws, and Dispatcher Reforms

Profiling by proxy is a form of discrimination in which a private person uses the 911 system as a weapon, calling police on someone whose race, ethnicity, religion, or other identity the caller treats as suspicious even though the person is doing nothing illegal. The bias originates with the caller, but the police become the instrument that acts on it. The term entered wide public use after a run of viral incidents in 2018 and has since prompted criminal statutes, civil causes of action, and new dispatcher protocols in several states and cities.¹

How It Works

Traditional racial profiling starts with the officer who decides to stop or detain someone. Profiling by proxy starts earlier, with a member of the public who picks up the phone. The caller describes a person as “suspicious,” “out of place,” or even armed, when what the caller is actually reacting to is the person’s appearance. Once the dispatcher relays that framing, officers may arrive already primed by the caller’s version of events rather than making an independent read of what they find.¹

The word “suspicious” does most of the work. San Francisco’s Bias-Free Policing Strategic Plan noted that the term is inherently subjective and that callers exploit that subjectivity to report “blameless actions” — picnicking, napping, swimming, street vending — that likely would not have been reported if the person involved were white.² The consequences fall on the person reported: an unnecessary and potentially dangerous police encounter, a loss of time and dignity, and in some cases arrest for conduct that was never a crime.

The Incidents That Named the Pattern

The concept had been discussed in policing circles before 2018, but that year a string of filmed incidents forced it into general use. Each followed a similar script: a white person called police on a Black person doing something ordinary and lawful, bystanders filmed it, and the footage circulated widely.

In April 2018, Jennifer Schulte placed two 911 calls over roughly three hours to report two African American men, Kenzie Smith and Onsayo Abram, for using a charcoal grill at Oakland’s Lake Merritt. No arrests were made.³ That same month, a Starbucks manager in Philadelphia called police on Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, who were waiting for a colleague; both were arrested for defiant trespass, and the charges were later dropped for insufficient evidence.⁴ In June, Alison Ettel called 911 on an eight-year-old Black girl selling bottled water outside AT&T Park in San Francisco.⁵

Campuses saw the same pattern. At Colorado State University that spring, a parent on an admissions tour called campus police on two Native American brothers, Thomas Kanewakeron Gray and Lloyd Skanahwati Gray, describing their clothing as bearing “weird symbolism”; officers pulled them from the group and searched them, and by the time they were cleared the tour had moved on.⁶ At Smith College that summer, an employee called campus police on Oumou Kanoute, a Black student eating lunch during a break from her campus job; the responding officer found nothing suspicious.⁷

The incident that most directly shaped later legislation came two years later. On May 25, 2020, Amy Cooper called 911 in Central Park after Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, asked her to leash her dog in a designated on-leash area. She told the dispatcher that “an African-American man” was threatening her. Prosecutors later said that characterization was “objectively not true” and that she made a second call escalating her claims. She was charged with falsely reporting an incident in the third degree; the charge was dismissed in February 2021 after she completed a five-session restorative justice program.⁸

Laws That Target the Caller

The wave of incidents accelerated a push in several states and cities to attach legal consequences to biased 911 calls. The laws fall into two broad groups: those that criminalize the conduct and those that give the person who was reported on a way to sue.

Criminal Statutes

California Penal Code § 653y makes it a misdemeanor to knowingly use the 911 system to harass someone based on protected characteristics including race, religion, and gender. Penalties include up to one year in county jail and a fine between $500 and $2,000.⁹

In New Jersey, N.J. Stat. Ann. § 2C:33-3(f), signed in August 2020, makes it a third-degree crime to knowingly place a 911 call to intimidate or harass someone based on protected characteristics.⁹

Virginia took a different route by raising the stakes for false emergency reports generally. Under § 18.2-461.1, a knowing false emergency report that results in an emergency response is a Class 1 misdemeanor, escalating to a Class 6 felony if someone suffers serious bodily injury and a Class 5 felony if someone is killed.¹⁰

Civil Remedies

San Francisco’s Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies Act, known as the CAREN Act and passed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors on October 20, 2020, makes it illegal to fabricate 911 reports based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics. People targeted by such calls can sue and recover at least $1,000 in damages plus attorneys’ fees.¹¹

Oregon’s H.B. 3216, enacted in 2019, created a civil cause of action against anyone who knowingly causes a police officer to respond with the intent to unlawfully discriminate. Plaintiffs can recover general and special damages, including emotional distress, $250 in statutory damages per defendant, and punitive damages. Claims up to $10,000 can be filed in small claims court.⁹

New York took its civil approach in a different direction after the Amy Cooper incident. Civil Rights Law § 79-n gives the state Attorney General authority to sue any person who summons police based on racial or other bias without reason to suspect a crime. Attorney General Letitia James used that authority for the first time in March 2021, suing David Elmendorf, a former ice cream shop owner in Schenectady, for filing a false, race-based police report during altercations with Black Lives Matter protesters.¹²

Not every proposal has passed. In Ohio, State Representatives Thomas West and Casey Weinstein announced “Darren’s Law” in February 2021, named after Darren Cooper, a Black man in Hudson who had police draw weapons on him in a parking lot after a bystander falsely reported he was holding a gun. He had been holding his iPhone.¹³ The bill would have created a civil cause of action and required liable callers to complete court-ordered implicit-bias training; as of the most recent reporting, it had not advanced.⁹

Outside the states and cities listed above, there is no general federal statute identified in the available sources that specifically targets biased 911 calls, so whether a particular call is actionable depends on where it was made.

What Dispatchers and Officers Are Being Asked to Do

Laws aimed at callers only do so much. If dispatchers pass every report through unfiltered and officers detain people to satisfy whoever made the call, the bias still reaches its target. Several agencies have begun redesigning the chain in between.

Dispatchers have historically been excluded from anti-bias training, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.¹ California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board recommended that dispatchers work from a flexible script designed to pull out whether a caller is describing concrete, observable behavior (“casing homes,” “looking into cars”) or only the subject’s appearance.¹⁴ The Marin County Sheriff’s Office Communications Center trained its dispatchers to flag and screen bias-based calls, a protocol later adopted in Sausalito and Mill Valley.¹⁵ A Snohomish County, Washington workgroup began developing technology to flag suspected bias-based calls both for the responding officer and for later statistical review.¹⁶

On the officer side, Sergeant Jeremiah P. Johnson, writing for the National Policing Institute, suggested that when officers arrive and observe no suspicious behavior, they should clear the call as unfounded rather than detain the subject to satisfy the caller.¹⁷ California’s RIPA Board went further, recommending that shift supervisors contact callers directly to explain that the agency does not respond to reports based on personal characteristics or hunches and only acts on observed suspicious or illegal behavior.¹⁴

Before You Dial, and If You Were the One Called On

Several police departments have tried to intervene before the call is placed. Sausalito and Mill Valley both adopted a “Three Considerations” framework asking residents to pause before dialing 911: Is the person actually committing a crime or endangering someone? If a friend or neighbor were doing the same thing, would you still call? Are the police the most appropriate resource for this situation?¹⁸ The University of California-Irvine Police Department built a “Handy Guide for Objective Threat Evaluation” around a simpler rule: if the reason you want to call police is the person’s appearance rather than their behavior, do not call.¹⁷

If you were the person reported on, your options depend on jurisdiction. In California, New Jersey, or Virginia, a knowingly biased or false emergency call may be criminally chargeable; in San Francisco, Oregon, and New York, there are civil paths, with Oregon and San Francisco allowing you to sue directly and New York routing complaints through the Attorney General. The ACLU, which represented Oumou Kanoute, has also published a “Living While Black on Campus” toolkit for students pushing their own schools to adopt reforms.¹⁹

Why It Remains Hard to Prove

Even where the laws exist, the underlying conduct is difficult to establish. Sergeant Johnson noted that the “counterfactual” is unknowable in most individual cases: there is usually no way to say with certainty whether the same caller would have reported the same behavior by a white person.¹⁷ A 2018 National Academies report on proactive policing found that there is “little informative quantitative data” in many settings on whether policing outcomes are influenced by race in a causal sense, because separating bias from situational factors is methodologically difficult.²⁰ California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board, which released its ninth annual report in January 2026 analyzing roughly 5.1 million stops conducted by 533 agencies in 2024, continues to track disparities and issue legislative recommendations, noting that federal immigration enforcement actions had heightened concerns about racial profiling.²¹ The 911 system depends on public reporting, and public reporting is only as fair as the people making the calls.

1
Vera Institute of Justice. Avoiding Profiling by Proxy
2
San Francisco Police Department. Bias-Free Policing Strategic Plan
3
KTVU. 2 Investigates Obtains BBQ Becky’s Viral 911 Calls
4
City of Philadelphia. PAC Report in Response to the Starbucks Incident
5
SFGate. Permit Patty Alison Ettel Audio 911 Police Water
6
NPR. College Apologizes After Native American Students’ Visit Is Sidelined by Police
7
Smith College. Responding to July 31, 2018, Campus Police Call
8
ABC11. Amy Cooper Video Charges Franklin Templeton
9
UCLA Law Review. Darren’s Law: Creating a Civil Cause of Action for Victims of Racially Motivated 911 Calls in Ohio
10
Virginia Code Commission. § 18.2-461.1 Knowingly Reporting False Emergency Communication
11
Courthouse News Service. San Francisco Passes CAREN Act to Outlaw Racist 911 Calls
12
New York Attorney General. Attorney General James Utilizes Authority to Prosecute False Race-Based Police Reports
13
Akron Beacon Journal. State Lawmakers Tackle Racial Bias 911 Calls
14
California Department of Justice. RIPA Best Practices
15
City of Mill Valley. Bias by Proxy
16
Snohomish County 911. BREC Presentation
17
National Policing Institute. Co-opting the Police: What Can Be Done About Profiling by Proxy
18
Sausalito Police Department. Bias-Free Policing
19
ACLU. Smith College Implements Racial Profiling Reforms
20
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities
21
California Department of Justice. RIPA Board Reports