Starbucks arrestees speak out
Men say they feared for their lives when police approached
PHILADELPHIA— Rashon Nelson initially brushed it off when the Starbucks manager told him he couldn’t use the restroom because he wasn’t a paying customer.
He thought nothing of it when he and his childhood friend and business partner, Donte Robinson, were approached at their table and were asked if they needed help. The 23-year-old entrepreneurs declined, explaining they were just waiting for a business meeting.
A few minutes later, they hardly noticed when the police entered — until officers started walking in their direction. “That’s when we knew she called the police on us,” Nelson told The Associated Press in the first interview by the two Black men since video of their trespassing arrests April 12 touched off a furor around the U.S. over racial profiling.
Nelson and Robinson were led away in handcuffs from the shop in the city’s well-to-do Rittenhouse Square neighbour- hood in an incident recorded on a white customer’s cellphone.
In the week since, the men have met with Starbucks’ apologetic CEO and have started pushing for lasting change at the coffee-shop chain, including new policies on discrimination and ejecting customers.
“We do want to make sure it doesn’t happen to anybody again,” Robinson said. “What if it wasn’t us sitting there? What if it was the kid that didn’t know somebody that knew somebody? Do they make it to jail? Do they die? What happens?”
On Thursday, they also got an apology from Philadelphia po- lice Commissioner Richard Ross, a Black man who at first staunchly defended his officers’ handling of the incident.
“I should have said the officers acted within the scope of the law, and not that they didn’t do anything wrong,” Ross said. “Words are very important.”
Nelson and Robinson spent hours in a jail cell and were released after midnight. Nelson said he wondered if he’d make it home alive.
“Any time I’m encountered by cops, I can honestly say it’s a thought that runs through my mind,” Nelson said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”