COPS COMPLAIN ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE WASTING POLICE TIME CALLING 911 WITH IRRATIONAL FEARS OF BLACKS

[EffieBlack]

17. No matter how many times you say it, the cops had NO obligation to arrest them based on a manager's

accusation and they DID have an obligation to conduct at least a cursory investigation before hauling these men off to jail – just as you did before even considering taking seriously an allegation that someone was behaving suspiciously.

I certainly agree with you that “the cops cannot refuse to enforce a trespassing law because they think the manager may be bigoted. It’s not in the law that the cops get to make that judgement.” That’s true. But this isn’t about whether or not the cops should have “enforced” the trespass law. This is about whether the cops should have first determined WHETHER the trespass law had actually been violated before making an arrest.

The police DO have the discretion and power – and, indeed, the obligation – to make sure that the people a complainant is accusing of a crime actually broke the law they’re being arrested under. If it appeared that the manager accused the men of a crime, not because they actually broke the law, which they hadn’t, but because she is biased against black people - as was readily apparent here given the disparate application of the so-called rule - the police do not have to – and shouldn’t - make an arrest.

Do you really believe the police at Starbucks were prohibited from acting in the responsible manner that you did on your call? Just as you didn’t act like a potted plant, but used your discretion and common sense to read the situation and, as a result, inferred that the complainant likely didn’t really have grounds to think the men were suspicious, what if these cops had used THEIR discretion and common sense to read the situation and confirm that whether the manager had grounds to accuse the men of trespassing beyond just saying they did - especially given that she was making this accusation against the only black people in the place while several white people who were "guilty" of the same "crime" were not asked to leave?

If, for example, when the police arrived at Starbucks, the manager said, "I want those two men to leave because they're wearing sneakers and we don't serve anyone with sneakers on, so they're trespassing." Should the police have gone straight over to the men – the only black people in the place - and ordered them out of the restaurant and arrested them if they refused to go - even if they couldn’t see their shoes under the table, so they didn’t know for sure if they had broken the rule or not, but they could see that half of the other customers, all white, were wearing sneakers? Or would it have been appropriate and advisable for them to ask the manager a few more questions about the no-sneakers rule she was claiming, to ask why she was applying the no-sneaker rule to all of the black people but none of the white people who were also wearing sneakers, and to confirm that the men were actually wearing sneakers?

What if, instead of just taking her word for her claim that the men were trespassing - since they weren't trespassing at that time anyway because they were never put on notice and not asked to leave – the cops subjected the manager to a mild cross-examination like the one you gave to the complainant and asked her a couple of questions, just like you did. For example, "Does the store have a policy that no one can stay if they don't buy anything?" Or "Did you tell them they had to buy something or leave?" Or "Did you ask them to leave?" Or "Did everybody else in here buy something?" Are you saying that would have been inappropriate?

And what if, instead of going over to the men, telling them the manager wanted them out, ordering them to leave and threatening that, if they didn’t leave immediately, they’d be charged with trespassing and arrested, the officers treated the men with the same respect that you treated the men you encountered? Perhaps asking them if they knew that Starbucks had “no buy no sit” rule and ask them how long they were planning to stay and if they were planning to buy something while they were there. If they said no, then the police could have simply issued them a ticket, rather than arresting them, handcuffing them and marching them off to jail like the criminals they weren’t.

What if the complainant in your situation told you the men weren't just "suspicious," but they were annoying her by making too much noise and she wanted you to arrest them for disturbing the peace or disorderly conduct, even though other neighbors said the men were doing nothing of the kind? Would you have gone over to them and ordered them to quiet down and threaten them with arrest if they didn’t? After all, that woman had every legal right to accuse them of disturbing the peace or engaging in disorderly conduct if they were truly annoying her – and aside from the fact that she was white and they were black, you had no way of knowing that she was motivated by racism and, as you’ve said, it's not your job to analyze someone's views on race. And, unlike the Starbucks manager, she’s a private citizen on private property and, thus, isn’t prohibited by law from discriminating against these men on the basis of their race.

We’ve surely beaten this dead horse into the next life, but one of the reasons I am pushing back on you so hard is that your “Arrest Them Now, They Can Sort it Out Later"approach you’re taking is very dangerous. It feeds directly and perfectly into the hands of bigots and others who don’t want to follow civil rights laws. Expecting our institutions – in this case, the police – to mindlessly follow and enforce the will of bigots as if they have no discretion, no say, no ability to do anything but go along with whatever and, worse, act as an instrument and enforcer of their bigotry and leave the discrimination victims to sort everything out AFTER the damage was done to them is the very definition of institutional racism.

Under this approach, if I’m a restaurant owner who hates and doesn't want to serve black people, civil rights laws be damned, I don’t have to even bother to post any “Whites Only” signs or deny them service. All I’d have to do is call the police every time a black person sets foot in my restaurant and, when the police arrive, accuse them of trespassing because I don’t want them there or because they’re violating some rule I just made up. If the police truly have no choice but to arrest them without question or thought, just because I said so, I can make sure pretty quickly that black people stop coming to my restaurant in very short order. And saying they can sue me later doesn’t work, since black folk – or any other target of discrimination – just don’t have the time, resources or energy to hire lawyers, go to court and try to win a case every time they’re denied a cup of coffee. After awhile, we’d just avoid certain places because it’s not worth the trouble and limit our choices to only those "public" accommodations where we're "welcome." And then, we’re right back in the Jim Crow era.

Fortunately, I think you are in a distinct minority when it comes to defending this position (and I don't think your defense of this position means that you support or condone racism and discrimination). The very fact that the Philadelphia DA refused to press charges, the police chief and mayor are apologizing their asses off, the police department is doing an internal investigation, and Starbucks is not only apologizing but is shutting down 8,000 stores for “anti-bias training,” is pretty solid evidence that the police screwed up by arresting someone just because a racist store manager told them to. And I have no doubt that a civil jury will disagree with your position and award the men some rather big bucks – if the department doesn’t settle with them first in order to avoid a humongous verdict a jury will surely award after finding that the police violated all sorts of policies, procedures and protocols by making an arrest just because a racist white store manager pointed at two innocent black men and screamed, “TRESPASS!