Posted on 10/23/2013 2:50:27 PM PDT by IbJensen
19-year-old college student from Queens says he was handcuffed and locked in a jail cell after buying a $350 designer belt at Barneys on New York's Madison Avenue because he is "a young black man."
Trayon Christian told NBC 4 New York on Wednesday that he saved up from a part-time job for weeks to buy a Salvatore Ferragamo belt at Barneys.
When he went to the store to buy it in April, he says the checkout clerk asked to see his identification. After the sale went through and he left the store, he was approached by police about a block away, and asked "how a young black man such as himself could afford to purchase such an expensive belt," according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
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Officers hauled Christian to the local precinct, where he showed police his identification, as well as his debit card and the receipt for the belt, the lawsuit says.
Police still believed Christian's identification was fake, and eventually called his bank, which verified it was his, according to the complaint. Christian, who has no prior arrests, was released.
He told NBC 4 New York that questions were racing through his mind while he went through the painful experience of being handcuffed and taken to a cell.
"Why me? I guess because I'm a young black man, and you know, people do a credit card scam so they probably thought that I was one of them," Christian said. "They probably think that black people don't have money like that."
He later returned the belt to Barneys because he says he "didn't want to have nothing to do with it."
He is suing the city and the luxury department store for unspecified damages as a result of "great physical and mental distress and humiliation."
Christian's attorney, Michael Palillo, told the Post, "His only crime was being a young black man."
Barneys said in a statement Wednesday that none of its employees was involved in any action with Christian other than the sale, and added that the store "has zero tolerance for any form of discrimination."
Thanks for making my case for me!
I’d never do it either, but I write it off as a cultural difference. The ladies he is trying to reel in probably appreciate that stuff more than the ones I was trying to impress at that age. I could get a girl just by pooling my money with a couple guys and throwing a kegger, so I got off easy :)
And you probably look like it, too.
I’d sue them too. The only time a government agent has any cause to ask you questions like that is if you are either a: crossing a border, where you might need to account for why you are bringing expensive items, or b: being investigated for some type of tax evasion/embezzlement/fraud. Neither of those are the case, so at the minimum, he was unlawfully detained, and perhaps because of a racial motivation.
If someone at the store called the cops then the kid will own them. If the bank OK’d the purchase that should have been the end of it. Having worked in both retail and in transaction settlements I can tell you that involving the police is NOT the store clerk’s job.
FWIW I’ve made *much* larger purchases with debit cards while dressed like a slob and never had a problem. Smart shopkeepers know that if you treat your paying customers like criminals, pretty soon only criminals will walk through the door.
Well, he has a job, and saves his own money to pay for what he wants, so even if he doesn’t have a father, he has managed to learn some basic responsibility, it seems.
Normally that would just be meeting minimum expectations, but nowadays, I say that puts him in the running for the “model citizen” category.
So because there are a lot of black youth involved in crime, non-criminal black youth should be automatically be detained by police if they buy something expensive?
Innocent until proven guilty mean anything to you?
Odds or not, that doesn’t mean all who fall under a certain demographic are guilty.
Serial killers are by far most likely to be white males, but that doesn’t mean all white males are serial killers.
It’s none of your damn business where any person obtained their wealth. Youth of all sorts wear hooded sweatshirts, my sons included. It has nothing to do with crime, it’s simply style.
Your presumption of wrongdoing is quite staggering. Not all youth are horrible people out to get you.
There’s a lot of druggies, and only one of you. We’ll save the taxpayers a lot of money if we just flip your suggestion around :)
Yeah, it’s hard to justify calling the cops on him for being suspicious, if he satisfied all their normal protocols for a purchase. Plus, if they can’t show they were treating white customers making similar purchases exactly the same, then they are really screwed.
City College has campuses all over the City, only charges nominal, income based tuition, so the taxpayers are paying for his “education”.
Well, this stuff is true for community colleges everywhere. I went to one for a couple years. You get all your basic requirements out of the way without dealing with some of the lib bullcrap endemic to four year colleges, and you save thousands of dollars in tuition, even if you get no subsidies.
If you are lucky, you can find some really good professors too, since a lot of them are professionals doing it part time, or retired professionals, who can give you the benefits of real world experience that full time educators almost never provide. You’ll even find conservatives hiding out in these institutions. My Comp 102 teacher taught the whole semester based on a Victor Davis Hanson text, my Humanities teacher glorified Western Civilization and Christendom, and my US History teacher was a traditional libertarian.
I hate when liberals play the gaw-damn race card without any merit.
That said, your comment is the single most racist thing I have ever seen posted on Free Republic.
Your response is a non-sequitur.
The number of serial killers as a percentage of all murderers is incredibly small. Therefore, your argument falls apart at the beginning.
The number of black youths involved in larcenies is amazingly high, and thus as a statistical matter, a very high likelihood that the person in question was committing a larceny during the purchase by using a stolen debit card, is also a high likelihood.
The point is that instead of suing Barnies and or the NYPD, he ought to be looking at other black youths and condemning them for making his life difficult to the point where the police thought detaining him was a high probability of arrest instead of seeing him as just another satisfied customer.
Or has the possibility not occurred to you ?
Just because it is a debit card does not mean it was a cash sale. I shop at places where my debit card gets run through as credit and yes they ask me for ID when it does. Alot of stores do that because it is cheaper on them to run it as credit. Th amount still comes straight out of my account even though it shows as credit on their end.
This sort of racial profiling always happens in conservative, Republican racist run cities....like New York City.
Different market I guess. In Canada debit is the cheapest way to take a payment as it is a flat fee (usually less than 25 cents, less than a dime for large-volume retailers), while credit is always a percentage of the sale. Most large stores encourage customers to take cash back when purchasing with debit because it’s cheaper than banking the cash, IOW the customer becomes their depository. The debit machines at Walmart here even prompt the customer for cash back on every transaction.
+1
I am sure that if you compared the number of black youth in New York City to the number of crimes committed by black youth, statistics would show that the majority of them are not involved in crime, in the same way that the majority of all populations are not involved in crime. It’s perception that the majority are involved, not the statistical fact. Further, if you add in the fact that this young man is employed and enrolled in college, the likelihood that he is involved in crime would drop even lower.
Asian gangs are a problem in many cities, but that doesn’t mean all Asians are the problem. Judge people as individuals and by their individual actions. Just because you’re suspicious of someone because of your preconceived beliefs based upon their appearance doesn’t mean that they are going to act along the lines of your fears. I am a large burly tattooed man with long hair and a ZZ Top worthy beard and I dress in work clothes. That doesn’t mean I ride a motorcycle or belong to the Hell’s Angels or behave in any other stereotypical manner.
I am an American. It’s my right to purchase any stupid thing that I have the cash for. If I decide to put my money into video games and soda pop instead of savings and salads, that’s my right.
This kid wanted something, saved up and bought it. He shouldn’t have been harassed for it.
But I do agree that we haven’t heard the whole story.
Sorry, but a debit card is not cash.
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