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Starbucks Employee Calls Cops On Black Man For Using Bathroom

The folks at Starbucks are back at it again…

According to a Patch story, an employee at a Brandon, Florida (of COURSE it was Flordia) called the police on a Black man for using the bathroom. Let 44-year-old Lorne Green tell it, he was going to meet a client and had to use the facilities before he placed his coffee order. Before he could even pull down his zipper and whip it out he heard the employee saying:

“A big black man is going to the bathroom.”

Green’s lawyer Jasmine Rand also repped Trayvon Martin’s family and explained her client’s predicament at a press conference.

“This incessant knocking starts,” said Rand. “Knocking on the door, over and over again. ‘Do you need fire rescue? Do you need fire rescue?’ And it became very clear that asking him if he needed fire rescue was not actually about helping Mr. Lorne. Simply, all my client did was use the bathroom while black.”

Green says he was so nervous that he called a Starbucks customer service rep while he was still in the bathroom.

Starbucks representative: “Ah, so you feel like this is racially motivated?”

Green: “It is, very! I walked in, she immediately, not even five minutes, she goes, ‘A black male went inside’ and called the police on me before I even got in the bathroom. I didn’t know what was on the other side of that door cause no one identified who they were and it felt like a crowd of people, and I was thinking, ‘Do you really want to open this door right now?'”

When he finally opened the door he said a white Starbucks employee ran up on him with the police and he was given a citation for trespassing.

Here’s what Starbucks corporate has to say about the incident:

We have zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind and take this type of accusation very seriously. We are conducting an investigation to understand what happened and will take appropriate action.

Hmph. Yeah. Sure.

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