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https://www.vox.com/identities/2018...-at-starbucks-black-men-arrested-philadelphia
Two black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks for doing nothing
They were there for a business meeting. Starbucks says it’s sorry. The police chief says officers did nothing wrong.
By Emily Stewart Updated Apr 15, 2018, 10:55am EDT
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Two black men were arrested and escorted out of a Philadelphia Starbucks on Thursday after staff called the police to report they refused to leave; the men hadn’t ordered anything and were reportedly waiting for a business associate to arrive. The staff reportedly called 911 because Starbucks does “not allow nonpaying people from the public to come in and use the restroom,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross told the Philadelphia Inquirer. The employees said the men were trespassing and had refused to leave the restaurant.
A video of the incident has swept across the internet and sparked widespread outrage, prompting Starbucks to issue a less-than-satisfying apology on Saturday afternoon. CEO Kevin Johnson issued a lengthy statement on the incident on Saturday evening and said he wants to meet personally with the men arrested to apologize.
The saga began when a video posted on Twitter on Tuesday showed police arresting two black men in Twitter for “doing nothing,” in the words of the user who posted the video. Two people — not the men — can be heard protesting as the police remove the men’s chairs and escort them out. “This is ridiculous,” one white man says to an officer in the video. The men do not protest.
The video has been viewed more than three and a half million times on Twitter since Thursday.
Police responded to the call and to keep things from “getting out of hand,” he said, and asked the men to leave, as Starbucks did not want them there. Ross defended the officers, saying they “did absolutely nothing wrong,” but the police department said it was conducting an “internal investigation.”
There are a lot of questions here, and they’re not just about the police.
The video of the incident shows at least six police officers taking the two men into custody — a high number, given they were doing nothing.
The obvious question: Beyond the police’s response, why were they called in the first place? People meet in Starbucks all the time, and they wait for others in the restaurant before ordering. Starbucks issued an apology on Saturday to the “two individuals and our customers” and said the company is “disappointed” that it led to an arrest. “We are reviewing our policies and will continue to engage with the community and the police department to try to ensure these types of situation never happen in any of our stores,” the statement says.
Johnson in a longer statement released on Saturday evening reiterated the apology and said the company plans to investigate the incident and “make any necessary changes to our practices that would help prevent such an occurrence from ever happening again.” He said Starbucks is “firmly against discrimination or racial profiling” and that he hopes to meet the men “to offer a face-to-face apology.”
A second video from the Thursday incident posted on YouTube shows an extended version of what happened. The two black men who are ultimately arrested speak calmly to police. A third man, later identified real estate developer Andrew Yaffe, who is white, appears and protests.
“Does anybody else think this is ridiculous?” he asks, calling it “absolute discrimination.” Yaffee spoke with attorney Lauren Wimmer about the incident, and she talked to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “He was meeting with the two gentlemen at the Starbucks to discuss business,” Wimmer said Saturday, identifying Yaffe as a friend. “These two guys are business professionals in commercial real estate.”
Wimmer is representing the men who were arrested, who have not been identified publicly. She told the Inquirer she believes the reason for the arrest was “completely based on race” and noted there was “no indication any crime was being committed.”
Starbucks is not the first major restaurant chain to come under fire for racial discrimination. In 1994, Denny’s agreed to pay more than $54 million to settle racial discrimination lawsuits; in 2004, Cracker Barrel paid $8.7 million in discrimination lawsuits.
Update: Story updated with statement from Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-are-on-the-defensive/?utm_term=.6693f47d1c20
Two black men were arrested waiting at a Starbucks. Now the company, police are on the defensive.
by Alex Horton April 15 at 2:20 PM Email the author
After two black men were arrested while waiting at a Philadelphia Starbucks on April 12, the company and the police are facing fierce criticism. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Starbucks, which once asked baristas to start a conversation about race with customers, faces fierce criticism after two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia store, sparking accusations of racial profiling over what the company’s chief executive now calls a “reprehensible” incident.
In a statement, CEO Kevin Johnson offered “our deepest apologies” to the two men on Saturday, who were taken out of the store in handcuffs by at least six officers on Thursday. A store manager had asked the two men to leave after they attempted to use the bathroom but had not made any purchases, police said. The men said they were waiting for a friend, their attorney later said. The manager then called 911 for assistance, the company said.
The police confrontation was captured on a video that has been viewed more than 8 million times on social media, fueling a backlash and drawing responses from the city’s police commissioner and mayor.
“I am heartbroken to see Philadelphia in the headlines for an incident that — at least based on what we know at this point — appears to exemplify what racial discrimination looks like in 2018,” Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, said.
The two men were taken to a police station, where they were fingerprinted and photographed, their attorney Lauren Wimmer told The Washington Post on Saturday. Her clients, who declined to be identified, were released eight hours later because the district attorney found no evidence of a crime, she said, adding that the Starbucks manager was white.
Wimmer said the man whom the two men were there to meet, Andrew Yaffe, runs a real estate development firm and said Yaffe wanted to meet the men to discuss business investment opportunities.
Multiple witnesses recorded the incident on cellphones. In one video, Yaffe arrives to tell police that the two men were waiting for him.
“Why would they be asked to leave?” Yaffe says. “Does anybody else think this is ridiculous?” he asks people nearby. “It’s absolute discrimination.” A woman chimes in off-camera: “They didn’t do anything.”
The two men appear to explain they are there to meet Yaffe. They remain seated and calmly speak with the authorities. An officer begins to clear chairs out of the way in apparent anticipation of an arrest. Yaffe suggests they will go somewhere else.
“They’re not free to leave. We’re done with that,” an officer replies. “We asked them to leave the first time.” The two men stand up to be cuffed. They do not appear to resist.
Melissa DePino, who recorded the viral video of the incident, told Philadelphia magazine that the men did not escalate the situation. “These guys never raised their voices. They never did anything remotely aggressive,” she said. In the video, there appear to be open tables for any potential waiting customers.
Thursday’s incident is a dramatic turn for a company that has positioned itself as a progressive corporate leader that touts “diversity and inclusion” — efforts that have also drawn its share of criticism. Last year, the company vowed to hire 10,000 refugees in a move that drew calls for a boycott mostly from conservatives. In 2015, its “Race Together” initiative for baristas to discuss racial issues floundered after the company found the public wanted fast coffee — not deep conversations about police killings of unarmed black men.
But now, Starbucks has been forced to bring race back into public discussion outside its own terms, following a moment that has drawn comparisons to nonviolent protests during the civil rights movement when black Americans’ refusals to leave segregated lunch counters were met with police force.
Local Black Lives Matter activist Asa Khalif organized a protest of the store on Sunday. He told a Philly.com reporter that he rejects Johnson’s apology, saying it was “about saving face.” If the company was serious, it would have fired the manager who called 911, he said.
Johnson vowed an investigation and a review of its customer-relations protocols, and he said he wanted to meet the two men for a face-to-face apology.
“Regretfully, our practices and training led to a bad outcome — the basis for the call to the Philadelphia police department was wrong,” Johnson said.
“Our store manager never intended for these men to be arrested and this should never have escalated as it did.”
Mayor Kenney directed the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations to review Starbucks policies and determine whether the company would benefit from training for implicit bias — unconscious discrimination based on race. His office will communicate with Starbucks further to discuss, he said.
Kenney said little about the response of his police force beyond mentioning an ongoing review from Police Commissioner Richard Ross. Police have also been criticized for how they handled the situation. The department did not return comment Saturday asking what laws they suspected were being violated and if any administrative actions have been taken during the investigation.
Ross, who is black, defended the actions of the officers in a Facebook Live video on Saturday, saying the officers asked the men three times to leave.
“The police did not just happen upon this event — they did not just walk into Starbucks to get a coffee,” he said. “They were called there, for a service, and that service had to do with quelling a disturbance, a disturbance that had to do with trespassing. These officers did absolutely nothing wrong.”
Ross said that he is aware of implicit bias and that his force provides training, but he did not say whether he believed it applied in this case. He added that police recruits are sent to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington to learn more about the struggle of blacks and minorities throughout history.
“We want them to know about the atrocities that were, in fact, committed by policing around the world,” Ross said.
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