Let's get this straight: I've never been a big-time criminal. True, I was arrested once as a trespasser. I was a newspaper reporter at the time, covering protests over clear-cutting in an old-growth forest near Arcata. I still remember the taunts of the other prisoners as the protesters and I were led into the holding cell. "Ooh, look out, here come the trespassers. They bad, man, they bad."

I'm not sure if it's a step upward in my crime career, but just recently I was identified as a "suspicious person" on the main street of Dunsmuir. I was coming home a couple of weeks ago on one of my regular Sunday hikes in the hills west of the town when, a block from my house, I was stopped by a sheriff's deputy in a patrol car.

I learned later, after talking to the sergeant who runs the sheriff's substation here in Dunsmuir, that the sheriff's dispatcher had received a call that a "suspicious person" appeared to be checking out homes, possibly as targets for theft, along a street that happens to be on the route of my hike.

Perhaps some shady character was indeed casing those homes. It certainly wasn't me--our basement is so full of stuff I don't know where I'd put any ill-gotten gains. But I was the nearest available suspect, and the caller's description roughly matched what I was wearing.

The officer asked me for an id. Somehow seeing my id cleared me of being "suspicious," and I was allowed to go on my way.

In the immediate aftermath of this incident, I was angry about being treated as a potential criminal a block from my home. But it got me thinking about the larger context in which it occurred, and what it suggests about the kind of community I want to live in.

Some of the immediate questions that came to mind were: What exactly are the criteria for stopping someone? Isn't it supposed to be directly related to solving a crime?

I think this is a gray area right now, one with shifting boundaries. My own view is that the criteria for being stopped, searched, asked for id, etc., are gradually shifting from the principle of innocent til proven guilty to one of guilty til proven innocent. (Have you taken a trip on an airplane lately?)

Sherry Ackerman in her column two weeks ago drew attention to pending national legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act, that could put American citizens in jail til they rot if a federal official decides they are engaged in suspicious activities tied to terrorism. Under provisions in this act, a U.S. citizen could be locked up indefinitely with no recourse to a court of law. And if you think, once we cross this line, that an upstanding citizen like yourself could never be the victim of such arbitrary government power, you'd better think again.

Apart from my own recent experience, I've seen a sheriff's deputy stop and question a young man with a backpack, passing through Dunsmuir, who was standing outside the local market and committing no crime. He was questioned, the young deputy later told me, because by targeting people like that he would sooner or later come across someone who actually was wanted for a crime. I'm sure this young officer felt he was doing a thorough and conscientious job of law enforcement.

But is this the kind of community we want to live in? Where the young and poor are singled out as targets of aggressive police activity? Where someone returning from a Sunday hike can be stopped as a "suspicious person"? Where we're fearfully peering through our curtain windows, ready to call the police whenever someone who looks a little odd or different walks by?

I grew up in a neighborhood in Sacramento where, 50 years ago, there was nothing like a Neighborhood Watch, because it was a real neighborhood where people just naturally visited and communicated and gossiped with each other and could readily tell who didn't belong there.

In her column Sherry Ackerman pointed out that Americans have been too busy shopping and watching TV (and, I would add, tweeting, twittering, Facebooking, etc.) to build solid communities, to find common ground among all the disparate groups in each community. But this kind of effort is starting to happen in Mount Shasta, with your food club and Trader's Co-op, and in Dunsmuir with a number of projects including the current effort to save our library.

All these projects are being pursued for positive reasons that go well beyond crime-fighting, of course. But building stronger communities and better neighbor-to-neighbor relations also makes it less likely we'll end up looking at the world as isolated individuals from behind our closed curtains, a world in which fear and a guilty-til-proven-innocent approach to law enforcement go hand-in-hand.