Today’s recommended top online offering comes to us from Commentary under the title “Eating Their Own”. Here’s the link.

It seems that recently two young black men asked to use the bathroom at the Starbucks Coffee on Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. They were advised that they could not unless they made a purchase. The young men declined and then sat down to wait for a business associate. They were told they had to leave, and, when they refused, police were summoned. When they refused police requests to leave, they were arrested.

This has triggered days of protests organized by Black Lives Matter and other groups. They have demanded that the store manager and the arresting officers be fired. The manager has “resigned”, and the fate of the arresting officers remains uncertain.

Starbucks’ CEO and COO flew in from Seattle to apologize to the arrested men and to meet with activist leaders, Philadelphia’s mayor and police commissioner. The CEO wants to “offer a face-to-face apology” to the arrested men for the “reprehensible outcome”.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission has started an investigation of the incident, and the Anti-Defamation League has joined the outcry, calling for “training” for Starbucks staffers. The ACLU of Pennsylvania is demanding that police stop racial profiling. As shown below, one group staged a protest while holding a sign emblazoned with the words “End Stop & Frisk”.

Police Commissioner Richard Ross, who is black, has posted a Facebook video defending the arrests and said the officers three times politely asked the two men to leave. “These officers did absolutely nothing wrong,” he added. “They followed policy. They did what they were supposed to do. They were professional in all their dealings with these gentlemen, and instead they got the opposite back.”

“As an African American male, I am very aware of implicit bias; we are committed to fair and unbiased policing,” Ross said. But he added “If a business calls and they say that ‘Someone is here that I no longer wish to be in my business’ (officers) now have a legal obligation to carry out their duties and they did just that.”

While all of this seems to be far removed from the days of Selma, Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses, and the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in Mississippi, the agitated demonstrations and expressions of outrage continue. Some demonstrators are even demanding that the offending Starbucks be closed permanently.

And now Starbucks has just announced that next month it will close its 8,000 plus nationwide locations for several hours to provide racial sensitivity training to staff. While it is doubtful that this corporate self flagellation will satisfy the protesters, it will be interesting to see how Starbucks hopes to prepare their baristas to sensitively deal with the type of defiant trespass that appears to have started the Battle of Rittenhouse Square.