Omari, if you’ve never played the game Ingress, you might want to download it and get involved in it. I mention this because everything Pokémon Go does now, with such visibility, Ingress has already been doing for a couple of years with exactly the same behavior patterns but less visibility because it’s not part of a 21-year-old mega-fad franchise.

If people have reason to be suspicious of people (of any ethnicity) playing Pokémon Go, they would have had more so to be suspicious of Ingressers, since people at least have a reason to know what Pokémon Go is. (I’ve been amused lately at various news media acting shocked, shocked to find that there are Pokéstops or gyms in churches and cemeteries, where Ingress players were already well aware that the best locations tend to be places like that.)

And Ingress tends to have very active communities, because it’s baked into the game’s mechanics that you need to have plenty of like-minded people working together in the same place to be effective. And at least in my own area, folks into Ingress have been getting into Pokémon Go, as well, partly because it’s something else to do while they’re out trawling for Ingress portals anyway and partly because the game makes a great recruiting tool for Ingress (among other things, Pokémon Go doesn’t have area maps of Pokéstuff available yet, but the Ingress Intel Map shows where the greatest concentrations of Ingress portals are and most of those will also be great Poképlaces).

So scratch your local Ingress community and you might find a dedicated community of Pokémon Go players already ready and willing to help out — or at the least, willing to share advice on how to organize a community of your own. And Ingress has its own geographically local communication chatroom built in, so if you don’t know how to get in touch with your local Ingress community any other way, just open the Ingress client and put the question out on your faction chat channel. (And join the Resistance, ‘cuz smurfs rule but frogs drool. :) )

Good luck! And fingers crossed that someday this level of fear won’t be necessary for anyone.