Shovelgate: LM alumna ignites conversation about racial profiling
By Julia Bell
During a snow day on the Main Line, while most students are sleeping in or sledding, those with an entrepreneurial streak capitalize on the weather by shoveling neighbors’ driveways or walks for compensation. On the January 27 snow day, Deborah Saldana of Penn Wynne was shocked when, after accepting the solicitations from two young African-American men, she saw them stopped by the police. According to her account, they sat in the snow for 20 minutes while the police ran background checks on them. Saldana posted about her experience on the Lower Merion Community Network Facebook group after her son asked what the they had done wrong and she was unsure how to answer. The story instantly began drawing attention, gathering over 300 “likes” and 1,000 comments, which contained several vitriolic arguments. In her post, Saldana questioned whether this could be racial profiling; other commenters argued whether it was harmless or “systematic racism.”
The police who stopped the men claimed it was an issue of age, not race. All solicitors over the age of 18 need a permit to shovel in Lower Merion Township. Although Saldana and her neighbor believed the boys were underage, the police claimed that they were 18 and 34 years old, thus needing to purchase the $50 permit.
Saldana stated that she saw the police pulling over two other African-American snow shovelers that same day. The police alleged that all of the boys stopped were adults. They also asserted that these are not isolated incidents and that they conduct 140 stops for solicitations every year. When speaking with The Merionite, Saldana said, “No one’s saying LM police are doing anything bad. They serve us; they’re there when we need them. It just seems extreme.”
This incident highlights what Saldana and others see as problem reagarding profiling. Saldana is familiar with being a minority in LM. As a member of LM’s class of 1983, she was “one of maybe two Hispanics that attended back in the day.” She described LM as predominantly “white upper-crust” and Jewish. Her brother was “harassed and stopped all the time, at school and on [her] property. He was stopped, because they didn’t think he was part of the neighborhood. He had to prove he lived there.” Although she had never experienced outright racism, she said she heard “mumbling about ‘the Hispanic.’”
“It was more homogeneous back then,” she remembers. Recalling how racial issues have evolved in LM since the 1980s, Saldana states, “I don’t know what the climate [at LM] is like now, but you see more of everything. It’s definitely more diverse. I think there’s more of a clas- sism.” Although Saldana sends her son to the French International School for bilingual education, she says she would have no qualms about sending him to LM when he is old enough.
“I can’t say it’s one or the other. It’s never black or white. It wasn’t my intention to open up that dialogue, but that’s what happened. Everybody carries their own biases; it’s just human nature. ” The buzz generated by the post was followed immediately with public discourse and a “media blitz” that included attention from The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“I realize I touched a nerve. I think profiling African-Americans is a problem across the country. I don’t think it’s perceived; it’s true. There’s a long history of profiling in Lower Merion. The only question in my mind is, if they were white females, would they have been stopped for a permit?” pondered Saldana, “The police told me they often get calls from neighbors and people in the township, and they have to follow up on them. Does the community call about all solicitors or just African-American ones?”