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I don't really understand. He used a credit card, card processed fine. At that point if the clerk is suspicious she can check the signature on the card, unless it says "see ID" on the card that is all you are responsible to do as a merchant.

Plastic crack addicts have no right to judge what is a worthy price to pay for stuff. Have you seen the price of the latest dark elves!

With a lot of these stories we basically only get the story in the initial complaint, often it takes a while for the police response, and then even longer for decent analysis to figure out where the truth lies (and we often never get that last one).

I will say, though, that even if the police acted responsibly and without any of the overt racism reported, the fact that there was a call to the police and the police thought the matter was worth taking him to the station, events I find it very hard to believe were as likely to happen if this was a white kid. That doesn't automatically mean that someone needs to be sued and hand money over, but it is worth thinking about.

 djones520 wrote:
I'm curious if they said that, or they said "How can a young man like yourself afford that" and he just injected the black part?

I'm not saying it went either way, but it's not a hard stretch for me to believe he assumed this was do to racism, and that's what he "remembers".

I suspect nothing like that was said at all. It just doesn't sound like how policemen talk. I could believe the question being "how can you afford that?", with young, black and the rest implicit, but actually saying those words?

Police will most likely just settle out on this one. I imagine NYPD has a large slush fund for such occasions.

While I admit this really pedantic and I apologise I can't help myself - a slush fund is a pool of general purpose money that gets used for one-off purposes, basically a strategic reserve that is originally built up dumping in all the odds and ends revenue you get over the course of many years. Whereas stuff like this lawsuit would be an on-going expense, with money set aside in a specific budget each year. So the NYPD would have a budget for such occasions. And again, I apologise, but I really, really had to do it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 d-usa wrote:
If you are called to investigate credit card fraud, and you approach the person accused of having a fake credit card, and you find that his two IDs match him and his debit card, then what further probable cause do you have to arrest him at this point?

Other than "young black kids couldn't have this kind of money [unless it is criminal]".

If the card was signed on rather than having a PIN the signature might not have closely matched. Or possibly there was a discrepancy between IDs, giving different home addresses. Or possibly the police asked him a question from his ID and got one wrong (as happened to a friend of mine once when their ID gave an old home address).

I'm not saying any of that did happen, nor am I saying that it is at all unbelievable that the police would be very heavy handed over suspicions that amounted to little more than race. I'm just saying that there's every chance there's more context to this that we haven't heard yet, because all we really have is the complaint, and that's hardly going to include both sides of the story.

Are we sure it wasn't one of those REALLY scary 'assault' belts?

Deja vu.

Rob Brown, star of ‘Treme,’ says he was cuffed at Macy’s after making legit purchase
The actor has filed a lawsuit against the retailer, alleging he was ‘paraded’ through the Herald Square location in handcuffs and placed in a holding cell after making a purchase — for no reason other than an employee there was skeptical his credit card was really his.

And, another story from Barneys, this time an expensive purse.

It looks like Barneys is apologizing and taking some steps to fend off a threatened picket.

And yet they write this on their twitter feed

Profiling Store Twitter wrote:
Barneys New York

Barneys New York

@BarneysNY


As Sarah Jessica Parker once told Vanity Fair, 'If you're a nice person and you work hard, you get to go shopping at Barneys. It's the decadent reward.'

NYC · barneys.com

Must be that those people failed their nice person save.

M.

Depends on what they mean by "nice person"

It's a misquote. It's supposed to be "white person".

NY State is opening an investigation into this.