Starbucks Revisited: Any changed minds?
A little over two years ago, here was quite the heated back and forth on DU over the incident in which the manager of a Starbucks called the police on a young black man whom she said refused to leave after she ordered him out of the shop because he sat down without buying anything. The police arrived and handcuffed, arrested and too him to jail, even though other patrons begged them to leave him alone and some white customers said they hadn’t bought anything, either.
Many DUers said this was yet another example of how black men are treated as criminals while other DUers defended the manager and officers and insisted they were simply enforcing store policy and the law and race had nothing to do with it.
I’m curious if, given all that’s happened in the past couple of years, if anyone has changed their mind about this incident since it occurred two years ago,.
But to some black Philadelphia residents who venture into Rittenhouse Square, the neighborhood where it happened, the treatment depicted in the video was a frustrating reality of everyday life.
Christian Hayden, 30, recalled a security guard searching his bags as he left a nearby Barnes & Noble. The guard found his copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir “The Beautiful Struggle,” and would not let him leave until the staff had checked the shelves to make sure no copy had been stolen.
Trevor Johnson, 27, a bike courier, recalled being arrested in the square four years ago after an officer asked him to turn off his music and he got up to walk away. And earlier this year, Michele Bradshaw, 49, said she left a Nordstrom Rack not far from the Starbucks after she noticed a security guard following her through the aisles of clothing.
In fact, statistics show that Rittenhouse Square, with its hotels, boutique museums and upscale shops, has the highest racial disparity in the city when it comes to police pedestrian stops. Although black people account for just 3 percent of the residents in that police subdistrict, they made up two-thirds of the people stopped by the police in the first half of 2017, according to figures collected by the American Civil Liberties Union.
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The eight-minute video clip of the encounter shows three officers in bicycle helmets standing around two black men, who were sitting and calmly responding to the officers’ questions. ... A few minutes go by, with the officers and the men continuing to exchange words, when a white man who was supposed to meet the men showed up. He began arguing with the officers, saying that they were discriminating against the two black men. Eventually, the white man said they would just go somewhere else, but the officer responded, “They’re not free to leave,” adding that they had already failed to comply.
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Ronal Serpas, a former police chief in New Orleans and Nashville, said it was “troublesome that an arrest occurred,” given the tremendous discretion officers have to handle such situations. “Using every available alternative to a physical arrest, within department policy, should be the goal in a case like this,” said Mr. Serpas, who is now a professor at Loyola University New Orleans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/us/starbucks-arrest-philadelphia.html
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