Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Whatever altercation occurred between the two men and the manager may very well have been something other patrons were not even aware of.
Again...where are your
multiple sources.
What part of "may very well have been" makes you demand that I provide links to sources for this? I'm speculating. My point is that there's a pretty simple and rational explanation for why so many of the witnesses would not be aware of why the two men were being arrested at the time they were arrested. Obviously, since my speculation is specifically about witnesses not knowing something, it's kinda hard to find witness accounts to support it.
Yeah. My word. Have you ever been in proximity to police arresting someone? Did you know why they were there, or what the person did? No. You almost certainly did not, unless you were personally involved in calling the police. if you were just standing around, or happened to be walking by when it happened, you would have no clue what transpired prior to that point which resulted in the arrest.
Most sane people, when they see something like that, make the reasonable assumption that the men being arrested must have done
something to justify the arrest. It's odd to me that, in our current social climate, if the cops are white and the people being arrested are black, increasingly the assumption is "they must have been arrested for being black". I'm sorry, but I find that weak.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that you, a witness to the arrest, did not see what happened to cause the arrest, does not automatically mean that nothing happened, and that the arrest was unwarranted. And frankly, in this case, we all know why they were actually arrested. The police arrived on a call in which the manager had asked the men to leave and they refused. This is a crime called "trespassing". For the police, they have exactly two options here. They can either get the men to leave on their own, and call it a day, or they are required to arrest the two men. Period. That's it. And when the police arrived, they repeatedly offered the two men a simple out: Just walk out of the Starbucks. The two men refused. That's why they were arrested.
We know why they were arrested. What we're not 100% clear on is exactly what caused the manager to call the cops in the first place. But yeah, I happen to be of the opinion that it's incredibly unlikely that it was simply because the two men were black. If I were a betting man, I'd put money down that they said something offensive to the manager in response to her statement that they had to be paying customers to use the restroom, and so she asked them to leave, to which they likely again responded with some sort of offensive verbal response, a clear refusal to leave, and possibly even threatening language or behavior. Obviously, that's speculation on my part, but the alternative is the absurd idea that someone working in customer service just randomly decided to target people because of their skin color and call the cops on them.
Again, this is based on years of working in a retail job, and seeing the full gamut of customers from friendly to absurdly offensive. And yes, I'll freely admit that part of my view of this is based on some of my own personal experiences. It's not like it's uncommon as a white person working retail to be subjected to the false claims of racism anytime you fail to break the rules for a person of color. Happens all the time, in fact.
I once had a black woman come into the store and attempt to use the ATM, but wasn't able to get her card to work, get money out of her account, etc. She then asked if I could cash a personal check, which is 100% against store policy. We also did not allow cash back for checks, nor third party checks, etc. I explained this to her, was super apologetic, etc. She responded by calling me just about every single racially offensive name you can. Redneck, racist, bigot, whitey, ******, etc. Everything. I was shocked that someone would assume that my reason for applying store police could not be because it was store policy, but because I must be a racist. That was not the first time, nor remotely the last time I had such an experience.
So yeah. You'll have to excuse me for not immediately buying the same "it must be because the store manager was racist" line. Seen it. Been there. Got the t-shirt. This claim is pretty much *always* BS (I've never seen it not be, but I can't rule out the possibility that there might, somewhere out there, actually be some racist people working in a store who might do something intentionally to ***** with people they don't like). The problem is that far too many people go out of their way to find some way to blame whatever thing upset them on racism instead of the far more likely explanations. So yeah, I'm going to be very cautious about such claims, and tend towards the idea that there's probably a more reasonable explanation to what happened.
And in this case, the more reasonable explanation is that the men engaged in some sort of behavior that prompted the call to the police. I just don't even buy the whole "they said they were waiting for a friend, but she tossed them anyway" bit. Doesn't make sense. If I'm working there, and I ask some people who walked in and sat down if they are planning on buying something, and they respond literally with "we're waiting for a friend to get here", my assumption is going to be that they're waiting for the friend to get there, and
then they're going to order something. Why on earth would I demand they leave, much less call the cops? It makes zero sense. They're assumed to be customers at that point. Again, there's a huge gap in this story, and I suspect that gap includes something they did that caused the store manager to call the cops that wasn't simply "being in a store while black".
Having seen lots of really really poor behavior from customers, I can think of a long list of things that might have been. And frankly, anyone on this thread who has ever worked any sort of retail job also knows what kinds of things would prompt them to ask a customer to leave, and call the cops if they don't. And I'm betting not one of them includes the person's skin color. So it seems silly to assume that's what it was in her case and not some more logical and rational reason. I get the whole "worlds full of racists" narrative. But put yourself in the store manager's position and ask "what would have had to have happened to me to call the cops". That's probably the correct answer. Certainly more correct than assuming she must just be a racist.