The latest story of white people calling the cops on black people for absolutely no reason is about parents trying to do nothing more than reach their kids after attending a weekend screening of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
The incident took place at a West Philadelphia theater on Friday night, when the police were called following a verbal dispute between the parents and one of the theater’s managers, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. A video of the incident was later posted to Facebook, sparking community outrage.
“A black person’s considered a threat immediately,” the father seen in the video, Ismael Jimenez, told the Inquirer, perthe Root. “So therefore, if they are defiant to you, instead of actually dealing with the issue, you are calling the police.”
Jimenez is a 36-year-old teacher at Kensington Creative and Performing Arts High School in Philadelphia. He explained that he and Ashley Jimenez had requested a refund about an hour into the Friday showing of Jurassic World, because of a loud beeping noise that kept going off in the theater as they were watching the film with their four kids and two of their kids’ friends.
The couple took their 3-year-old with them to speak with a manager, but left the rest of the children in the theater to continue watching. The manager agreed to give them a refund, but wouldn’t allow them back into the theater, even when Jimenez’s wife Ashley explained that they needed to get their kids. When she finally went inside to get the children, the manager called the police.
One officer was already at the theater, and approached the couple asking them to leave. Ashley pulled out her phone to record an encounter. “Ask us to leave, why? Because they messed up?” Ismael Jimenez said in the video.
Ashley wrote in a Facebook post accompanying the video:
Last night at the movies there was a consistent loud beeping noise where we were sitting. After requesting politely to [rectify] the issue, the managerial staff failed to correct the issue and we had to ask for a refund. The manager then said we had to leave immediately and said we couldn’t go back into the theater and get our children,. When we said that is not an option and we were going to get our children, they called the police on us. This video recorded our interaction with the police and the absurdity of the police being called in the first place.#whitefear #complainingwhileblack #yurugu #moneyback #8to12police
As more cops began to surround Ismael Jimenez, he told the Inquirer his 11-year-old son was so afraid that he ran to the bathroom to vomit. “He was worried that I was going to get hurt,” he said.
At one point in the video, a bystander is heard asking the obvious question: “Does this really call for more than six fucking officers right now?” Eventually, a black officer helped diffuse the situation. There were no arrests.
A word of advice: stop calling the police on black people for sitting in a Starbucks, taking a nap, leaving their Airbnb, touring a college, having a cookout, doing their job, or trying to get their kids from a movie theater.
