We don't know anything about the reasons - we have only third-party information, which describes that some called the police on a mentally challenged person who had no ill intent, and that person also was black. Maybe racism added to the picture - quite possible, maybe not - it's impossible to tell from just this. It is a fact that there are many cases when black people are treated with prejudice, it is also a fact that there are many cases where mentally ill people are treated with prejudice, and it is also a fact that there are many cases where there are misunderstandings between people not caused by racism or anything like that. If you're a lone elderly woman and see somebody going about your property that you don't know and behaving weirdly, you might feel threatened, whether it's warranted or not. Surely, race may have played a role, but we don't have any real reason to conclude either way without knowing first-person accounts.

You're trying really hard to justify how this isn't racism. The poster lives there and knows these people, take it or leave it, your opinion isn't valuable.

I'm not trying to justify anything. Saying "I don't know" is not justifying, it's admitting lack of information.

> your opinion isn't valuable.

Unlike yours, which is even though I obviously take the effort of not forming opinion before I have the information, while you seem to have formed opinion not only about the situation, but even about my motivations in discussing it, without any information to go on. If you think that makes your opinion more valuable, I think you are sadly mistaken.

What he's saying is that we don't know. Innocent until proven guilty, maybe?

This isn't a courtroom, it's OP's anecdote. Stop concern trolling.

Why did the poster mention "mentally handicapped"? Was that not an attempt to manipulate our perceptions too? Obviously playing on the notion that handicapped people are harmless, therefore it must have been race, but that too is a form of prejudice.

We don't know. But, the likelihood of race playing a factor in this particular person feeling threatened in a very specific way, the casing of her house for its future burglary by a black individual, is a bit higher than her being spooked by the behavior of someone who possesses the ability to travel to, locate and borrow a ladder from someone with the aid of a computer.

This one case is not meaningful; there is racism, it does cause black people to be harassed and worse, and that's a serious problem.

Huh? The op explicitly stated that the african american gentleman was mentally handicap. I'm merely begging the question, could the home owners reaction be based on some strange behavior symptomatic of a mentally handicap individual?