Two Black men in Ohio said they never before encountered the humiliation they experienced when they were targeted by armed cops for purchasing “high-ticket items” during a shopping trip to Bed, Bath & Beyond last week.
On June 16, couple Lamar Richards and Austin Geer, both from South Carolina, went to the Bed, Bath & Beyond in Toledo after purchasing their first home. Richards said they were among the first customers when the store opened that morning and noticed they were the only people of color. In an interview with The Daily Beast Thursday, Richards said they didn’t notice anything suspicious at the time but realized in hindsight that they were treated differently than other shoppers. He said the manager told them they had to leave the vacuum they wanted at the counter while they continued to look around the store, but he saw other customers with vacuums in their carts.
(Bed, Bath & Beyond has been doing a number of closeout sales across the country to prepare to shutter doors after filing for bankruptcy in April.)
“After we paid our money…we heard a police officer ask the cashier who just rung us out, did we pay?” Richards said. “That’s what prompted me to begin recording.”
He said the officers did not ask the same of any white customers in line.
In a series of videos Richards and Geer filmed and posted on social media, a woman in a pink shirt—who Richards identified as the store manager—approached the couple.
“So, apparently someone called and said they thought maybe we were shoplifting or something?” Richards asked the manager, explaining that he just spent $600 at the store.
“If there’s big-purchase items, that type of thing, there’s usually a question,” the manager said.
Still, Richards replied he didn’t understand why the cops were called specifically on the Black customers.
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“We call the police all the time,” the manager said. “They have our backs.”
The manager called over an employee who admitted to calling the police.
“It’s my right to call [the police],” the employee told Richards and Geer before moving behind a police officer.
“I don’t know what you want us to say,” the manager interjected. “I don’t care if they’re white, Black, or green, if someone is walking around with big, high-ticket items—”
But Richards claimed no one batted an eye at other shoppers walking around with expensive items, and asked the police how store employees described them during their call for help.
“Two Black males,” one officer responded, explaining they let the situation go once they realized neither Richards nor Geer had anything “concealed.”
Richards told The Daily Beast he felt “humiliated” and that the manager and employees walked off after refusing to provide their names. Once he and Geer went to their car, he said they were leery and nearly expected to see more cops show up.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Richards said, explaining that they sat in the car for about an hour in shock and trying to process what happened.
“I was, quite honestly, scared and frightened because people that look like Austin and I have been arrested for much less,” Richards said. “When [the police] asked if we paid, and they did it in an authoritative way, that if that cashier—even for a minute—was hesitant, I felt like that could have ended very badly for us.
“Other than the fact that we were shopping while Black and that we had a lot of items in our cart, that’s really the only thing we could think of that they use as a really terrible excuse to call the cops on us.”
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Geer said the manager’s justifications for calling the police on them sent “chills down [his] spine.”
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the couple, said he wanted to make sure the company “is not able to just sweep this under the rug.”
“That they have to address this bigoted behavior exhibited by their employees, their highest level of employees at that store,” he said.
“We’re two young guys excited about this next chapter,” Richards said. “The last thing we expected to have was this encounter.”
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Bed, Bath & Beyond said they take “matters of this nature very seriously and do not tolerate discrimination of any kind.”
“We are deeply concerned about the reported incident and are actively looking into the matter, as we do with any incidents described that are inconsistent with our policies and procedures,” the company said.
However, the statement did not address the company’s policies regarding “high-ticket” items.
“You know how often this happens to people of color, especially Black people, for shopping while Black,” Crump told The Daily Beast. “The humiliation associated with the post-traumatic stress of being confronted by police when you’re completely innocent. You know that when Black people have interactions with police, it can go left really, really fast.
“To think about why this happened and what could have happened…is saying, ‘What can I do to avoid this in the future?’ Absolutely nothing.”
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