Left and Right Divided After Starbucks Asks 6 Police Officers to Leave
Summary from the AllSides News Team
On July 4, a Tempe, AZ Starbucks employee asked 6 police officers to leave the establishment or move out of a customer's line of sight after the customer said the officers made them feel "unsafe." The officers had paid for drinks and left upon request. The story ignited debate on social media, and Twitter users created a viral hashtag, #boycottstarbucks, in protest of Starbucks' decision to ask the officers to leave. Starbucks has since issued a public apology.
Last year, two black men were arrested for trespassing after they refused to leave a Philadelphia Starbucks when they had not ordered drinks. The men said they were waiting for a friend, who arrived as they were being taken away by police. Starbucks settled with the men privately, fired the employee who asked them to leave, and closed 8,000 U.S. stores for anti-bias training.
Some on the right questioned why Starbucks would not close its 8,000 stores for anti-police bias training nor fire its employee following the Tempe incident. On the Right, Charlie Kirk, writing at Fox News, compared the treatment of the police officers to 1960s-era attitudes, in which black Americans were not served at segregated coffee shops. In the Center, Sheryl Atkisson, an award-winning investigative journalist who is married to a former police officer, defended police in general, saying "the vast majority of cops are good." And finally, Left author EJ Montini writes that conservatives calling for a Starbucks boycott are hypocritical because they did not do the same when the two black men were arrested in the Philly Starbucks.
Featured Coverage of this Story
From the Left
Dump the #DumpStarbucks hashtag and national hand-wringing over Tempe police incident
It’s like the first line of a bad joke: “Six Tempe police officers go into a Starbucks …”
And the punchline is even worse.
An unwise decision by a single barista in a single coffee shop on a single day winds up as a triple, venti, double-shot, non-fat, caramel macchiato campaign for a national boycott.
It’s time to dump the #DumpStarbucks hashtag, which never should have existed in the first place.
From the Right
Charlie Kirk: Starbucks engages in intolerable discrimination against police
On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., and politely ordered coffee. White waitresses ignored them because the store had a policy of not serving African-Americans.
The incident sparked massive protests across the nation involving sit-ins by black people at Woolworth lunch counters, leading the chain to finally desegregate that July and boosting the civil rights movement.
This week, on the Fourth of July, the Officers Association in Tempe, Ariz., says six police officers were drinking coffee at a Starbucks...
From the Center
Good cop, bad cop, and the Starbucks incident
I married a cop.
Well, he’s a retired lawyer now, but he was all cop when I met him. And as a young reporter at the time, I learned a great deal from this police supervisor and SWAT team commander that would prove useful in my career as a journalist.
I learned that — while relatively rare— there are bad cops, poorly-trained cops, power-hungry cops and careless cops. I even covered a case in Florida in which an auxiliary police officer turned out to be a serial killer. He shot...
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