Starbucks manager who called 911 on loitering black men 'no longer at that store'

[Ferguson Philly Arsonists]

The chief executive of Starbucks on Monday called for
“unconscious bias” training for store managers and apologized
for what he called “reprehensible” circumstances that led to the
arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia store last week.

CEO Kevin Johnson said in an interview on “Good Morning America”
that the company was reviewing the actions of the store manager
who had called the police. Johnson said that “what happened to
those two gentlemen was wrong.”

“My responsibility is to look not only to that individual but
look more broadly at the circumstances that set that up just to
ensure that never happens again,” Johnson told interviewer Robin
Roberts.

Johnson is expected to meet with the two men, the company said.
Exactly when the meeting would take place was not immediately
clear.

Protests continued on Monday at the Starbucks where the men were
arrested, with crowds initially gathered outside only to be
driven inside from heavy rains. “Good Morning America” described
the protests inside the Starbucks as “a stand-in.”

At around 6 a.m. Monday, an Inquirer reporter tweeted that
roughly 40 protesters were at the Starbucks in a relatively
upscale neighborhood of the city. One person in the crowd
hoisted a sign that read “Is she fired or nah?” referring to the
store manager who called the police. Others chanted “anti-
blackness anywhere is anti-blackness everywhere.”

Starbucks said later Monday that the store manager “is no longer
at that store.”

Just before 1 p.m., a reporter tweeted a photo of a sign outside
the Starbucks that said the location was temporarily closed.

Rosalind Brewer, Starbucks’ chief operating officer, referred to
the company’s call for unconscious bias training among store
managers in a morning interview with NPR and called the incident
a “teachable moment for all of us.” She said that as an African
American executive with a 23-year-old African American son, she
found the cellphone videos taken of the Thursday afternoon
incident painful to watch.

“It would be easy for us to say that this was a one-employee
situation, but I have to tell you, it’s time for us to, myself
included, take personal responsibility here and do the best that
we can to make sure we do everything we can,” Brewer told NPR.

At least two cellphone videos captured the tense moment when at
least six Philadelphia Police Department officers stood over two
seated black men, asking them to leave. One officer said that
the men were not complying and were being arrested for
trespassing.

“Why would they be asked to leave?” Andrew Yaffe asked on a
video Yaffe runs a real estate development firm and wanted to
discuss business investment opportunities with the two men.
“Does anybody else think this is ridiculous?” he asked people
nearby. “It’s absolute discrimination.”

The two unidentified men were taken out in handcuffs soon after.
The men were held for nearly nine hours before being released,
said Lauren Wimmer, an attorney who represented the men over the
weekend. No charges were filed, authorities said.

One of the videos of the arrest rocketed across social media,
with more than 9 million views by Monday morning.

Benjamin Waxman, a spokesman for Philadelphia District Attorney
Larry Krasner, said over the weekend that the office decided
that there “wasn’t sufficient evidence to charge [the men] with
a crime.”

On Monday morning, Johnson said there are some scenarios that
warrant a police call — including threats and other disturbances
— but that in this case, “it was completely inappropriate to
engage the police.”

After the arrest, the police were criticized for their handling
of the situation. On Monday the department referred to the
police commissioner’s Facebook Live video from Saturday.
Commissioner Richard Ross said in the video that one or both of
the men asked to use the restroom but had not purchased
anything. An employee said Starbucks company policy was to
refuse the use of the bathrooms to non-customers and asked the
men to leave, according to Ross. The employee called the police
when they refused.

“These officers did absolutely nothing wrong. They followed
policy; they did what they were supposed to do. They were
professional in all their dealings with these gentlemen,” Ross
said in the video. “And instead, they got the opposite back.”
Ross said police arrested the men after they refused three
requests to leave.

Ross, a black man, said he was aware of issues of implicit bias
— unconscious discrimination based on race — but did not say
whether he believed it applied in this case. He said the
incident underscores the need for more body-worn cameras to
present different perspectives of police responses. The officers
were not wearing cameras, he said.

It was not immediately clear on Monday whether the investigation
has concluded.

Starbucks does not have a companywide policy on asking members
of the public to leave, a company official said. The company
leaves safety and customer service protocol decisions up to
store managers, said a company official who declined to give a
name to freely describe internal discussions. Managers may leave
restroom doors unlocked or add key code entries if they feel the
store is more at risk for criminal behavior. A store in the same
area of Philadelphia was hit with an armed robbery recently, the
official said.

The Starbucks official acknowledged that the incident is at odds
with a common practice at Starbucks that usually does not
provoke suspicion or calls to police. The stores are “community”
hubs, the official said, where people often drop in to use the
WiFi or chat with friends without necessarily buying anything.

Wimmer, a white woman, said she spent a good portion of her time
in law school in Starbucks without buying much and never had a
problem with store employees. The incident was about race,
Wimmer said. She suggested an experiment: Go to a Starbucks and
assess the demographics of people sitting there.

“Who is the manager going to call and say, ‘Please leave?'” she
asked.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/04/16/two-
black-men-were-arrested-at-starbucks-ceo-now-calling-for-
unconscious-bias-training/?utm_term=.f334f54c378a