Black teenager arrested after buying expensive belt

[EVT1]

usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/23/21098696-black-teen-sues-over-arrest-after-buying-350-designer-belt

     A 19-year-old college student from Queens says he was handcuffed and locked in a jail cell after buying a $350 designer belt at Barneys on New York's Madison Avenue because he is "a young black man."

     When he went to the store to buy it in April, he says the checkout clerk asked to see his identification. After the sale went through and he left the store, he was approached by police about a block away, and asked "how a young black man such as himself could afford to purchase such an expensive belt," according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court.

     Officers hauled Christian to the local precinct, where he showed police his identification, as well as his debit card and the receipt for the belt, the lawsuit says.

     Police still believed Christian's identification was fake, and eventually called his bank, which verified it was his, according to the complaint. Christian, who has no prior arrests, was released

Guilty until proven innocent I guess.   Guess he can afford plenty of new belts after this one.

[Opti]

Not surprised. I still remember watching police target 4 young black men in New
Brunswick, NJ. literally just because they were black. Their only offense seemed to be
being black and perhaps being 4 of them in a car together.


I think they just got pulled over and hassled, but they were pulled over in a
generic 5 to 8 year old sedan the minute they exited the parking lot and hit the
town streets. Shocked and saddened me, but I've heard driving while being
an Asian male results in a fair amount of nusiance pull overs by police as well.



(The bad thing about this story is it implies Barney's called the cops of the purchaser.)

[reader79]

www.nydailynews.com/new-york/hamill-business-usual-barneys-racially-profile-article-1.1494890

www.nydailynews.com/new-york/black-barneys-shopper-accused-buying-2g-purse-article-1.1494855

This woman purchased a $2,300 Celine handbag with her tax refund in the spring, and was grabbed by cops in the subway station.

Kayla Phillips, 21, a nursing student from Canarsie, told the Daily News she had long coveted the orange suede Céline bag. Armed with a cash infusion from a tax return, she took her Bank of America debit card and headed to the Madison Ave. flagship store on Feb. 28.
Phillips made the purchase without incident but says she was surrounded by cops just three blocks away, at the Lexington Ave. and 59th St. subway station.

In one of the articles she mentions that the clerk made a quick phone call during her transaction. Barneys, of course, denies they sent the goon squad.

[billisonboard]

A 19-year-old college student from Queens says he was handcuffed and locked in a jail cell after buying a $350 designer belt ..."

He should be sentenced to an economics class.

and yes I know the thread is about race.

[zibazinski]

[bean29]

The article I read said that the Woman that called her CC did not match the rest of her ID b/c it was some kind of a temporary card.

To me, that is not profiling - there was a reasonalbe cause for concern.  You have to temper your concern about racism with your desire to be protected from someone stealing your identity.  Clerks can ask for my ID all the time and I will not give them flack - they are protecting me from identity theft.

The case of the Male buying the belt though, does not sound justified.

[Virgil Showlion]

He is suing the city and the luxury department store for unspecified damages as a result of "great physical and mental distress and humiliation."

Uh huh.

[Tennesseer]

Virgil Showlion -you never know how these lawsuits or worker comp cases will turn out.  Like this worker comp case:

University of California cop who pepper-sprayed student protesters awarded $38,000

A former University of California policeman who stirred public outrage by pepper-spraying peaceful student protesters has been awarded $38,000 in woker's compensation for psychiatric damage he claimed to have suffered from the 2011 incident, the university said on Wednesday.

Then-campus police Lieutenant John Pike came to symbolize law enforcement aggression against anti-Wall Street protests at the time when video footage widely aired on TV and the Internet showed him casually dousing demonstrators in the face with a can of pepper spray as they sat on the ground.Pike was suspended from his job at UC.

[Virgil Showlion]

OK. You win. I can't think of anything to top that.

Maybe that lawsuit about the thief being trapped in a locked garage, although I seem to recall that one is an urban legend.

[djAdvocate]

Oct 24, 2013 11:01:07 GMT -5 Tennesseer said:

Virgil Showlion -you never know how these lawsuits or worker comp cases will turn out.  Like this worker comp case:

University of California cop who pepper-sprayed student protesters awarded $38,000

A former University of California policeman who stirred public outrage by pepper-spraying peaceful student protesters has been awarded $38,000 in woker's compensation for psychiatric damage he claimed to have suffered from the 2011 incident, the university said on Wednesday.

Then-campus police Lieutenant John Pike came to symbolize law enforcement aggression against anti-Wall Street protests at the time when video footage widely aired on TV and the Internet showed him casually dousing demonstrators in the face with a can of pepper spray as they sat on the ground.Pike was suspended from his job at UC.

[ZaireinHD]

oh I just saw this story on the morning news I watch - but it was about Barneys on New York's Madison Avenue - and how people are protesting the store, and how Jay-Z just signed to do a display for their window and how people are protesting that as well and how people are urging Jay-Z to break his contract with the store.

[EVT1]

www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Black-Customers-Shopping-Barneys-Macys-NYPD-Harassment-229299061.html

Looks like a pattern. 

[mmhmm]

That's a real shame.  I feel badly for this kid and anyone who's had such a thing done to them.  It just doesn't make any sense to me.

[moon/Laura]

Oct 24, 2013 10:38:31 GMT -5 Virgil Showlion said:

He is suing the city and the luxury department store for unspecified damages as a result of "great physical and mental distress and humiliation."

Uh huh.

Are you telling me that if this happened to you, that you would not feel humiliated? I call baloney if so.

I know that if I saved my money, bought what I wanted on the up and up, and was subsequently detained for ANY reason, I would be embarrassed. Add in the racial aspect on top and i totally see where this kid is coming from.

[Virgil Showlion]

Oct 26, 2013 18:27:32 GMT -5 moon/Laura said:

Oct 24, 2013 10:38:31 GMT -5 Virgil Showlion said:

Uh huh.

Are you telling me that if this happened to you, that you would not feel humiliated? I call baloney if so.

I know that if I saved my money, bought what I wanted on the up and up, and was subsequently detained for ANY reason, I would be embarrassed. Add in the racial aspect on top and i totally see where this kid is coming from.

I'd feel inconvenienced and worried that the police would draw up phony charges to justify the arrest. I'd feel humiliated if I'd done something wrong. Otherwise, merely inconvenienced and worried.

If I sued the city, it would be to recoup any wages lost during the arrest (zero, in my case, since I'm a salaried worker). However I wouldn't sue the city, both for religious reasons and because the city taxpayers owe me nothing. The arresting officers would already either have been disciplined (or not) for making a spurious arrest, irrespective of a lawsuit. Neither they nor the city could care less about the suit since it isn't their personal money being paid out in settlements; it's taxpayer money, of which they have an infinite supply.

In short, a lawsuit would be frivolous and pointless. It would make me look like a greedy opportunist, reinforcing the negative image of my race (or whatever motivated the arrest) in the eyes of the officers.

I might write the officers a letter imploring them not to make snap judgments in the future, trying to reason with them on a personal level, or a letter to their supervisor(s) if they seemed utterly unrepentant. And I'd appreciate my civil liberties all the more after having them briefly revoked.

[mmhmm]

The man was humiliated.  His dignity was insulted publicly.  That's humiliation.  If you've done something wrong, you might feel embarrassed; however, humiliation requires someone else to act against you in a way that denigrates you.  That certainly happened in this case.  The man was publicly arrested for what appears to be no valid reason.

While I, too, am not one to file lawsuits (I don't think money would do anything to mitigate this situation), I'm not this man.  Some people believe the only way to get the attention of an entity bigger and stronger than you are is to hit it in the pocketbook.  That may be true.  One thing is certain:  There appears to be no reason for this man having been arrested and taken to jail.  None.  He has every right to be furious and the laws of this country say he has every right to file a lawsuit for what was done to him.

[Virgil Showlion]

Oct 27, 2013 8:49:00 GMT -5 mmhmm said:

The man was humiliated.  His dignity was insulted publicly.  That's humiliation.  If you've done something wrong, you might feel embarrassed; however, humiliation requires someone else to act against you in a way that denigrates you.  That certainly happened in this case.  The man was publicly arrested for what appears to be no valid reason.

While I, too, am not one to file lawsuits (I don't think money would do anything to mitigate this situation), I'm not this man.  Some people believe the only way to get the attention of an entity bigger and stronger than you are is to hit it in the pocketbook.  That may be true.  One thing is certain:  There appears to be no reason for this man having been arrested and taken to jail.  None.  He has every right to be furious and the laws of this country say he has every right to file a lawsuit for what was done to him.

He has a right to paint a giant swastika on his belly too, but that doesn't mean it's right or a good idea.

The city does not care about the lawsuit. I know that many posters embrace the mythic principle that lawsuits filed against a city can somehow motivate great positive changes, but these people fail to realize that the pocketbook managers and the pocketbook owners are two very disconnected groups of people, neither of which are responsible for the tort. Monies are paid out from an insurance fund set aside for the purpose of settling lawsuits. City lawyers take their cut. The courts and court employees take their cut. The lawyers for the plaintiff take their cut. The plaintiff gets some ridiculously large settlement in no way commensurate to the magnitude of the tort. The fund is financed year by year by an infinite supply of taxpayer money or municipal debt. And the wheels go round and round.

Does the arrested man have a right to be upset with officers who arrested him for no good reason? Certainly.

Will suing the city accomplish anything at all other than making his pockets and a bunch of lawyers' pockets fatter at taxpayers' expense? Absolutely not.

And although "great humiliation", "emotional distress", etc. may legally entitle him to sue for some ridiculous amount of money, they're stupid laws if they entitle him to more than $100.00 for what he went through.

[mmhmm]

Godwin notwithstanding, Virgil, there is no comparison between painting a swastika on one's belly and filing a lawsuit for humiliation and mental distress.  This man didn't inflict those things on himself.   They were inflicted upon him by officers of the law and for no apparent reason.  To now, there has been no mention of a sum of money for which the man intends to sue.  Anything along that vein is strictly conjecture.  I'm not going to go there.

Would I sue under these conditions?  No.  However, my estimation of what's the right thing to do in this case doesn't have to be this man's estimation.  I'm not the be-all-end-all of right things to do.

[Virgil Showlion]

Oct 27, 2013 10:04:13 GMT -5 mmhmm said:

Godwin notwithstanding, Virgil, there is no comparison between painting a swastika on one's belly and filing a lawsuit for humiliation and mental distress.

Sure there is.

They're both bad ideas.

I can give other examples, too:

- Insulting a pro boxer's mother.
- Riding a self-made ornithopter off the edge of a cliff in an attempt to fly.
- Parking a ruby-studded car in the wrong part of town and leaving it unattended for several hours.
- Petting a snow leopard cub.

So many different places, people, and situations, united by the fact that they're all perfectly legal and they're all extremely bad ideas.

[mmhmm]

I guess, in a case like this, Virgil, I don't see the value of nonsensical comparison.  What happened to this young man was unthinkable.  It's not acceptable.  What he chooses to do about that is up to him, as far as I'm concerned.  I wouldn't fault him.  You may occupy the soapbox of righteousness if you wish, accompanied by silly excuses.

[Virgil Showlion]

What happened to this young man was unthinkable.

He was arrested on suspicion of theft.

"Unthinkable", to me, is if they'd fed him to possums. Because honestly, who could conceive of a $300.00 belt leading to death by possum?

I've already said that I place the value of a wrongful arrest and afternoon detention at $100.00. If you offered me $100.00 to be interrogated by police for 15 minutes, then cuffed, driven to a police station, and held until my bank confirmed my identity, I would take you up on the offer. I'd use the proceeds to buy my wife and I a gourmet dinner afterward. If you advertised a $100.00-to-be-arrested-for-an-afternoon deal online, you'd have to shut down the state borders for sake of Americans mobbing your city to take you up on the deal.

And you're right: we don't know how much this fellow is suing the city for. I've assumed it's a ridiculous amount of money because the numbers that newspapers publish are invariably ridiculous, but suppose for sake of argument that this fellow is suing for $100.00 plus legal expenses.

And legal expenses are what? $5K? $10K? $20K? And what does it cost the courts? What does it cost the city lawyers? The clerks, insurance officers, and bureaucrats involved in handling the claim? Would it be unreasonable to expect the whole debacle to cost $50K or more? And how many productive hours of his time is this man going to waste sitting on his prat in a courtroom?

Hence to recoup a piddling $100.00 in damages--which is more than a fair settlement for his "emotional distress"--he's forced the city to flush as much as $50K straight down the toilet (and it is down the toilet; that money has produced nothing the slightest bit useful) while wasting countless hours of his own time. That, I'm sorry to say, is stupidity. And if the courts hike up the settlement amount so that a wrongful arrest turns into an automatic windfall, then that is stupid.

Hence I do fault him. What's he's owed is a letter of apology from the officers involved and any wages he lost as a result of the detention. If the city isn't willing to reimburse him the wages without him suing them, then it's not worth the colossal waste of time and money going after them. Chalk it up in the "life experience" column, notify the press if you think the publicity will help prevent similar incidents in future, and move on.

You may occupy the soapbox of righteousness if you wish

Better than the morass of relativism.

[moon/Laura]

Oct 27, 2013 11:11:08 GMT -5 Virgil Showlion said:

What happened to this young man was unthinkable.

He was arrested on suspicion of theft.

for no reason beyond the color of his SKIN! Why are you minimizing that fact? They had no legitimate reason to suspect him but you seem to think that their actions were justified.

[mmhmm]

He was arrested on suspicion of theft.

"Unthinkable", to me, is if they'd fed him to possums. Because honestly, who could conceive of a $300.00 belt leading to death by possum?

What suspicion of theft?  On what grounds did the authorities suspect this young man of theft?  If I go to the grocery store and buy $350.00 worth of food, am I to be arrested on suspicion of theft?  Really?  I think not!  I'm still walking around and nobody has arrested me.

Frankly, I don't care what "unthinkable" means to YOU.  I know this was "unthinkable" as far as I'm concerned, and I wouldn't be surprised it's going to prove to be "unthinkable" to a number of other people.

[mmhmm]

And you're right: we don't know how much this fellow is suing the city for. I've assumed it's a ridiculous amount of money because the numbers that newspapers publish are invariably ridiculous, but suppose for sake of argument that this fellow is suing for $100.00 plus legal expenses.

Maybe, one of these fine days, you'll learn not to ASSume quite so easily, Virgil.  Over the years, you do learn it's not the greatest of ideas.

[Virgil Showlion]

Maybe, one of these fine days, you'll learn not to ASSume quite so easily, Virgil. Over the years, you do learn it's not the greatest of ideas.

I'll tell you what. We'll check back on this in a few weeks and see if any dollar figures appear in the news. If the lawsuit is for $1K (i.e. ten times the reasonable amount) or less plus legal expenses, I'll declare right here in this thread that I made a lousy assumption.
 

for no reason beyond the color of his SKIN! Why are you minimizing that fact? They had no legitimate reason to suspect him but you seem to think that their actions were justified.

I don't think their actions are justified at all.

But suing the city will not "fix" the officers. Their supervisor has already suspended them, or fired them, or let them off with a slap on the wrist. It's done. They overstepped their authority, wrongly arrested a man, and created bad publicity for the city. The police force has protocols in place for disciplining officers who violate the public trust.

Does suing the city change that? No.

Does it change what happens to the officers? No.

Does it undo the man's humiliation? Does it right the wrong? No.

Does it cover some expense he incurred? Was he beaten and requires medical care? Did he miss a baseball game and need his tickets refunded? No.

Is anything accomplished by this except the city paying "shut up" money out of a taxpayer-funded insurance fund they couldn't care less about to a man wrongly arrested by two police officers? No.

Yes, it was wrong of the officers to arrest the man. But if he sues the city, he's either reaping a windfall he doesn't deserve from people who have done him no wrong (the taxpayers), or he's reaping $100 he does deserve, but wasting 500 times this much--as well as time and resources--in order to obtain it.

Two wrongs do not make a right.

[mmhmm]

I'll tell you what. We'll check back on this in a few weeks and see if any dollar figures appear in the news. If the lawsuit is for $1K (i.e. ten times the reasonable amount) or less plus legal expenses, I'll declare right here in this thread that I made a lousy assumption.

You still don't quite get it, do you, Virgil?  Whether one's assumption turns out to be right, or wrong, it was still an ASSumption.  When we're taking it upon ourselves to criticize another, it seems to me the right thing to do is NOT to ASSume.

[Virgil Showlion]

Oct 27, 2013 15:28:14 GMT -5 mmhmm said:

I'll tell you what. We'll check back on this in a few weeks and see if any dollar figures appear in the news. If the lawsuit is for $1K (i.e. ten times the reasonable amount) or less plus legal expenses, I'll declare right here in this thread that I made a lousy assumption.

You still don't quite get it, do you, Virgil?  Whether one's assumption turns out to be right, or wrong, it was still an ASSumption.  When we're taking it upon ourselves to criticize another, it seems to me the right thing to do is NOT to ASSume.

My argument doesn't depend on the correctness of the assumption.

I've said if he reaps a windfall, he doesn't deserve it and the taxpayers don't deserve to be charged for it.

If he sues the city for < $1K plus legal expenses, which I consider unlikely based on my past observation but still acknowledge is possible, then my grievance is that he's wasting time and money recouping a halfway reasonable amount of compensation. The amount he gets in recompense is dwarfed by the costs of the courts and the bureaucracy.

Either way, my proper respects go out to the nameless men and women who deal with the humiliation of being wrongfully arrested without flinging lawsuits and hitting taxpayers up for money. As you may have guessed, I value stoicism incredibly highly and activism virtually not at all.

ETA: And for the record, I don't care if they arrested him because they thought he looked like the zombie of John Dillinger. A wrongful arrest is a wrongful arrest. What matters from a compensation standpoint is the financial harm to the victim.

[kilroy]

I do hate the idea of NYC taxpayers paying for these cases (since I am one) and I think the aggrieved shoppers should go after the store(s) rather than the police who were just acting on the store's report (which of course the store denies).  In one case a debit card with no name on it was used, so there was some reason for questions to be asked.  But that's only one of what are now 4 claims.

[moon/Laura]

pleas note that I never said I agreed or disagreed with the lawsuit angle. However, I do sometimes think they're a means to make a point in a big way. I imagine the store would have to be sued for a fairly large sum before it really made a dent in the corporate wallet. But maybe that's what it takes to get them to stop assuming someone is a criminal simply due to skin color (or any other reason that makes a customer not fit their hoity toity stereotype).

[Virgil Showlion]

What if they suspected him because 30% of the black teenagers who walk, talk, and dress like him that walk through the door are running credit card scams?

What if it's 40%? 60%?

At what point should they acknowledge that serving a particular demographic is too great a risk to be profitable?

Let's consider the problem from that standpoint. Suppose you are a Macy's storeowner. You have a standard markup on your merchandise--your standard retail margin. And suppose out of all the black teenagers that look and talk a certain way, you've determined that roughly 30% of them that come into your store are running credit card scams. The credit card company won't reimburse you for your losses, and a simple bit of math shows you that a 100% loss on 30% of this demographic more than annihilates your profits from the legitimate 70%. In short, by serving this demographic no-questions-asked, you are guaranteed to lose money.

You have several options:

- You can upgrade your credit card security so that you only accept electronically validatable cards with PINs. This will understandably upset and alienate your customer base that doesn't have this kind of credit card.

- You can eat the losses or raise prices on all your goods in an attempt to recoup your losses, hoping that you don't price yourself out of the market.

- You can pay out a large monthly sum to the various credit card companies to insure yourself against perpetual fraud.

Or

- You can give every black teenager using a credit card a hard time, even refuse them service and involve the police, to mitigate your losses at the expense of the 70% "good" portion of this particular demographic.

So what do you do? Rest on your principles? Or run a profitable business? And don't say "Oh, the problem isn't that bad," because I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that if we went in and talked to these "hoity toity" store managers, some of them which may well be black themselves, they'd report numbers like 30%+ fraud for groups as specific as black teenagers that look and dress like such. The groups they single out might be even more specific than this. People are perceptive. And it's extraordinarily easy for us to sit a mile a way and shrug, "Oh, yeah, I guess you're losing fistfuls of money on that demographic, but at least you're not being hoity toity."

So what would you do? Hypothetically?