General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The Starbucks thing... [View all]Ms. Toad
(34,187 posts)is not sufficient reason to refuse to remove the person from the premises - regardless of whatever any other patrons say - absent a pattern and practice that suggests the owner is using the police to enforce discriminatory practices.
The property owner has the right to determine who is welcome on the property, and who is not (absent discriminatory enforcement against individuals in a protected class) and the reason they gave is a pretty common rule - you may not use our facilities - including the restrooms unless you are a paying customer. (My understanding is that the arrest was because the men refused to leave when the manager and the police had both asked them to leave - which is a slightly different matter and, if their intention is to promote action, a very smart act of civil disobedience on their part.)
Had the manager said, "these men are trespassing because they are black," the police would not only have been right to refuse the request - they would have been acting unconstitutionally had they removed the men. Their enforcement of a blatantly discriminatory request would have made their actions state discrimination.
Less clear cut would have been if they were called to the same Starbucks every day to remove black individuals and every time they went there were white people engaged in the same behavior they were not asked to remove. You could make a good argument that, in those circumstances, the police would be risking violating the constitution by repeatedly removing black patrons once the pattern became apparent.
That does not appear to be the case here. This appears to be one-off matter (not that it doesn't happen regularly to blacks, but I have not heard any allegations that this particular Starbucks (any more than any other) is enforcing its rules against minorities but not against whites. So even if there are white individual present engaged in the same behavior, this one-time incident is a matter for the courts in civil rights litigation. Not the police called to the scene to remove someone on the property after the owner, or the owner's designee, has asked them to leave.
That is the kind of situation that formal testing best routes out - sending in sandwich tests, to the same restaurant, with the same manager. Carefully matched testers to ensure that race is the only difference, carefully scripted performances, to document disparate treatment. The kind of haphazard collection of individuals who happened to be in the restaurant on this single occasion is not legally sufficient for police to determine race was the basis for removal because there are likely to be too many random differences between the individuals, their actions, their interactions with the manager, etc.