TexasCHLforum.com

agarcia82 wrote:I have a chl and i have lots of tattoos..does that make me a bad guy?? I think what you did was just racial profiling..you didnt care what the man had to say..you just seen tattoos and automatically thought he was a bad guy.. and when you told him to buz off thats exactly what the man did he left you alone..you on the other hand did not my good sir you pursued it by calling the cops.. heaven forbid someone with a tatoo ask you for help if they are being robbed youl just shut the door on them..

It doesn't make you a bad guy but it makes your job harder to make a good first impression.
Question, do you have tattoos on your hands or neck? Those two places for tattoos scream "gang member" to me from my experience working with law enforcement in Los Angeles and also from conversations with my Father in Law who is an assistant chief of Police out here in Texas. Tattoos on arms, legs, and back are much more common and I hardly notice them, but those two areas (neck/hands) seem to be more prevalent in certain gang type cultures. So if my personal experience tells me that a lot of people with tattoos on their hands or neck have been or are currently involved with gangs then I would be more inclined to keep my distance or treat them with suspicion until given a reason to act otherwise (friendly conversation, no BSing in your sales pitch, association with somebody I trust, etc).
Such a situation happened to me a few weeks ago where a guy knocked on my door, as I was walking up to the door and just about to open it up I saw that he had tattoos on his hands and at that point I decided to keep the door closed and just talk to him that way. He wanted to "look around" inside because he was part of the crew that remodeled the house before we moved in and was curious how it turned out. It felt weird so I told him no and he left no problem. But it was definitely his tattoos that set of the initial warning bells in my head.

Blindref757 wrote:I called the cops because at the very minimum, they needed to be field interviewed. When houses start getting broken into, the detectives need a starting point.

yep! I would have called the cops as well. After a series of break-ins you often hear people saying things like "oh yeah, there were those two guys going around door to door last week, they looked a little out of place but I didn't think anything of it at the time."

When I worked for a college public safety department we really appreciated it when students or other campus community members called us because they thought somebody looked out of place. We would just go out and FI them and decide if they had legitimate business on campus (private university on private property made the job pretty easy ). We liked being able to deter crime this way rather than fill out burglary reports later.

Last week in the middle of the afternoon somebody knocked on the door of my apartment really really lightly. I looked through the peephole and saw people I didn't recognize, one of them had a hoodie up over his/her head (couldn't tell), and the other looked like an early 20-something in baggy clothes. I didn't open the door, I just watched as they did the same thing to the neighbor. After a few minutes I decided to take a stroll and saw them at the next building over, thats when I was able to see they had some kind of ID on a lanyard and the "him/her" with the hoodie turned out to be a young woman. Not sure what they were up to or selling but after getting a better look at them my threat meter went down a notch.