Boy’s paper route draws neighbor’s call, brush with police
Uriah Sharp begged his mother to buy him some new wrestling action figures, but Brandie Sharp figured it was a good time for the 12-year-old to learn the value of a dollar by earning a few himself.
So she called the local newspaper office and requested a route. She planned to sit in her car and read while her two sons — the older one is 17 — dropped advertising circulars on neighbors’ doorsteps.
But when the police cruiser pulled up shortly after they started in Upper Arlington, Ohio, last week, she realized her 12-year-old black son was about to get a different kind of lesson. Uriah, it turns out, had gotten some of the addresses wrong. Upper Arlington has a strong anti-solicitation ordinance, and the Sharps had been warned against putting their deliveries on the steps of people who didn’t want them. The 12-year-old was trying to fix his mistake.
But a woman at a park across the street saw the child walk up to a house empty-handed, pick up something and leave, said Officer Bryan McKean, a spokesman for the Upper Arlington Police Department. “I mean, I don’t want to say something was going on, but it just . . . seemed kind of suspicious,” the caller told a dispatcher on the nonemergency line.
None of the Sharps were charged with a crime.
Still, as Sharp noted in a post on Facebook that night: “Sad I cant even teach my son the value of working without someone whispering and looking at us out the side of their eye perhaps because we DON’T ‘look like a person that belongs in their neighborhood.’ ”
African-Americans engaged in benign activities have long been viewed through criminal-tinted glasses by neighbors, shopkeepers or people just passing by. Black people have had the authorities sicced on them while going to the gym, waiting for the school bus and couponing. Many of the incidents are held up as examples of insidious, everyday racism or #Livingwhileblack.
Sharp said she worries that her son’s next interaction with suspicious neighbors could result in something much worse than hurt feelings.
“It breaks my heart,” Sharp told The Washington Post. “