Marcus Trufant on Kam Chancellor 911 call: ‘I blame the boss’

Nobody wants to be racially profiled. Also, nobody wants to feel threatened while at work. When it comes to the recent 911 incident involving Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor, his former teammate, Marcus Trufant, says the problem starts at the top.

“I blame the boss,” Trufant said on KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show.

“I blame whoever is in charge. They put the women in a situation where she didn’t know really how to react,” he said. “But if you have somebody who is a potential buyer coming up to the building, you need to be more accepting of what is going on. Not that they just look sketchy and he has on a do-rag, and all this kind of stuff. You’ve got to do better than that. You’ve got to have the staff prepared for all situations.”

Related:This is what Seahawks’ Kam Chancellor looked like when 911 was called on him

Trufant played for the Seahawks from 2003-11. Today he’s a member of The Barbershop podcast with KIRO Radio. His time on the Seahawks briefly overlapped with Chancellor’s.

Redmond police were called on March 2 as Chancellor was trying to get information about buying a closed down gym. A gym employee can be heard on the 911 recording describing Chancellor and his friends as “bad news” and speculated that the unknown individuals outside the building could be “homeless kids” or “heroin addicts.”

While the case looks like blatant racial profiling on its surface, Dori said some of his listeners have come to the female employee’s defense, arguing they would want their wife or daughter to be safe rather than sorry. Gym owner Ryan Neal also said in a statement that his employees acted properly when calling 911, and that his employees always “err on the side of caution,” adding that the club has recently experienced attempted break-ins.

Trufant noted that erring on the side of caution is smart in theory, but “if everybody did that in all situations the world would be a tough place to live.”

Barbershop-mate Terry Hollimon added that if it was one of his loved ones, he would want them to get more information before making an extreme decision.

Hollimon noted that, thanks to hindsight, it’s clear the employee didn’t do a great job discerning what the people wanted, seeing as Chancellor obviously wasn’t trying to rob the establishment. That means he likely wasn’t yelling or banging aggressively on the front door.

“If she would have done a better job in discerning why they were there, she would have been able to find out, ‘Oh, these guys just want the phone numbers. They just want some information,'” he said. “Using some common sense and deductive reasoning: ‘these guys are not here to rob me.’ So I would say, ‘Listen, no one is here to answer your questions. Here’s the phone number, call them tomorrow.’ And if they didn’t leave at that point, then we have a problem.”

Hollimon added that he’s been in similar situations.

“You know how many times I’ve been to Starbucks when it was closed and I was like, (loud knocking) ‘I just want one soy latte! Please!'” he said.