A Starbucks store, two black men, a handful of police officers and several eyewitnesses with iPhones: Welcome to the "national conversation on race," circa 2018. If you've been online in the last couple days, you've likely seen one of the viral videos where two black men were handcuffed while waiting for a white male friend in a Starbucks in Philadelphia.
In one video, posted by eyewitness Melissa DePino — which at this writing has been viewed more than 9 million times — the two black men are being arrested, for what appears to be the offense of standing around in the store, when the friend arrives and asks: "What did they do? What did they do? Someone tell me what they did." He continued to call the arrest "ridiculous."
In an interview with Philadelphia magazine, DePino explained the scene in more detail:
I was just sitting there working on my laptop, and I guess I first noticed them when the two first cops — the bike cops — walked in. The girl behind the counter had called 911, apparently, and the cops came and said the guys were "trespassing." They said we were waiting for somebody, and then the white guy in the video — that's their family friend they were waiting for — he shows up. The guys wanted to know what they did. And then more cops and more cops and more cops show up.
Then the situation began to escalate, as DePino described:
A bunch of people in the store were standing up and talking to the girl behind the counter and the cops, asking why this was happening. And then they freaking put them in handcuffs and perp-walked them out the freaking store. These guys never raised their voices. They never did anything remotely aggressive.
The two men were later released by police without charges, but not until they had reportedly spent eight hours in custody. Shortly after news of this incident first broke, Starbucks issued a bland, ambiguous statement of regret that struck many commentators on social media as inadequate. Since then, the company has issued a statement in which CEO Kevin Johnson called the arrest a "reprehensible outcome."
Johnson's primary goal, he wrote, was "to once again express our deepest apologies to the two men who were arrested with a goal of doing whatever we can to make things right." Secondly, Johnson said, he wanted to tell the world "of our plans to investigate the pertinent facts and make any necessary changes to our practices that would help prevent such an occurrence from ever happening again." Third, he sought to reassure the public "that Starbucks stands firmly against discrimination or racial profiling."
Later in the statement, Johnson appeared to subtly cast blame for the incident on Philadelphia police. "Our store manager never intended for these men to be arrested and this should never have escalated as it did," he wrote. "We also will further train our partners to better know when police assistance is warranted."
Philadelphia's police commissioner Richard Ross defended the cops involved in the arrest, saying they were simply doing their jobs.
"As an African American male, I am very aware of implicit bias; we are committed to fair and unbiased policing," Ross said in a statement via AP News. "If a business calls and they say that 'Someone is here that I no longer wish to be in my business' [officers] now have a legal obligation to carry out their duties and they did just that."
The Philadelphia video has already sparked a lot of conversation about systemic racism and what Ross described as "implicit bias." Perhaps that's the upside of this thoroughly unfortunate episode, a major black eye for a business that has sought to portray a progressive and tolerant image.
In 2017, hate crimes experienced an increase in the United States for the second consecutive year — and about half of the incidents attributed to racial bias targeted black people.
In June 2009, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, visited the United States and concluded in an infamous report that "racism and racial discrimination have profoundly and lastingly marked and structured American society":
The United States has made decisive progress in the political and legal combat against racism, through the resistance of communities of victims, the exemplary and powerful struggle of civil rights movements and the growing political confrontation of racism. However, the historical, cultural and human depth of racism still permeates all dimensions of life of American society.
As many experts will tell you, there's no direct approach to eliminating implicit bias in our culture. For many people, such bias is entirely unconscious — a result of many factors, including the inundation of media representations. Jack Glaser, a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, argues however that there are "lower hanging fruits" that can help eliminate implicit biases.
One possible intervention, Glaser wrote in a recent blog post, is to limit "the discretion that police officers have in who they stop in the first place."
"This is a direct result of the very permissive Supreme Court stance on police stops, which essentially is indifferent to whether racial bias motivates a stop, as long as there is a legal pretext for it, like the classic broken taillight," Glaser wrote. "This is compounded by the very vague (and often circular) definitions of "reasonable" suspicion, the legal standard required for an investigatory stop."
A continuous effort to raise awareness about racial profiling, implicit bias and discrimination is important too — and at least the Philly Starbucks video has helped further that goal.
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