General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: COPS COMPLAIN ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE WASTING POLICE TIME CALLING 911 WITH IRRATIONAL FEARS OF BLACKS [View all]EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)The manager told 911: "There are two gentlemen in my cafe who won't purchase anything and won't leave." That's not a crime. It's certainly not trespassing. And she didn't allege they were trespassing and she didn't even report the elements of trespassing. For example, she didn't say that people had to buy something in order to stay and she didn't say she had asked them to leave (probably because she hadn't)
When the dispatcher put out the call, she didn't say anything about a trespass. She said, "A group of men are creating a disturbance." (Where in the hell did THAT come from?).
Based on that, the police should have at least done what you did when you arrived on the scene to respond to a report of someone "looking suspicious."
You said repeatedly in earlier posts that cops have no duty to do any investigating or ask any questions when responding to a trespass complaint other than to determine that the manager has the legal authority to tell someone to leave and whether the people are still there But the police weren't responding to a trespass complaint. They thought they were responding to a complaint that a group of men were "creating a disturbance" - which sounds very similar to "some men are acting suspicious."
Yet when you responded to the latter call, you didn't just take the complainant's word for it and just assume the men were acting suspicious. You conducted your own investigation first and, as part of that, you questioned the complainant's basis for believing that someone was behaving suspiciously, determined that their motive was racism and then made a point of making them "feel like a total asshole" good for you!
Yet this seems to go against what you have repeatedly said before - that it wasn't the cops' job to assess the Starbucks manager's motives or to do determine that there really was probable cause to arrest the two men - that if the manager wants them out and they don't leave, they should be arrested. But not only were the men not trespassing when the police arrived - since they hadn't been asked to leave - it is pretty clear that the manager's desire to have them removed was based on bigotry, not the fact that they hadn't bought anything - the police didn't even make a cursory effort to confirm that the manager had a lawful (i.e., non-discriminatory) reason to remove them nor did they bother to investigate whether they had actually been asked to leave before the police were called. And, on top of that, when the suggestion was made by their friend that they all leave, the cops said "No. Too late" and arrested them anyway. And no one seemed to care that they'd been brought there on false pretenses since there was no group of men creating a disturbance at all.
It's too bad the cops weren't as conscientious as you were and didn't make the effort to resolve the situation instead of trespassing and arresting two men who weren't trespassing and certainly weren't engaging in the behavior - creating a disturbance - that the police were called to the scene to address.