Remember that white girl who called the cops on those two black guys?
No, not the one from Yale. Sarah Braasch called the cops on one black guy for trying to study and one black woman for sleeping. That was totally different.
No, not the Waffle House lady or the one from the cookout or ...
You know what? Perhaps I should have been more specific.
It turns out that Holly Hylton, the Starbucks manager who is also a finalist for the whitest name of all time, might also be the person behind a curious uptick in 911 calls from the same Philadelphia Starbucks location where two black men were kicked out for making Hylton uncomfortable by existing. Hylton “mutually” agreed to end her employment after she called the cops on the two men.
According to the Philadelphia Tribune, in all of 2016, emergency operators received 11 calls from that particular Starbucks franchise. But that would soon change when the coffee retailer hired a new employee in early 2017.
After Hylton became an employee at the location, the Starbucks made 41 emergency calls in 2017 and has made another 17 so far this year. (It looks like Hylton really increased her production numbers.)
Aside from the occasional racist rant by some extra-sensitive white person going through caffeine withdrawals, have you ever seen anyone acting disorderly in a Starbucks? What does that even mean? Did Hylton spell someone’s name wrong and call the po-po when a customer informed her that her name was “Megyn” and definitely not “Megan”? Other than those at readings of Emily Dickinson poems and the waiting rooms at sperm banks, I feel like Starbucks’ crowds are the most orderly in the world.
In all of 2016, before Hylton joined the World Class Wretching Crew, emergency personnel received only two calls for disorderly crowds from that location. After Hylton’s arrival in 2017, 28 of Starbucks’ 41 calls that year were for disorderly crowds. Even more incredibly, of all 67 emergency calls placed from that Starbucks, only one other arrest has ever been made.
Although Uniform Crime Reports does not indicate who made the 911 calls, the increase in emergency calls from that location coincides with Hylton’s employment, according to former employee Ieshaa Cash (pronounced “Yesha”).
Patrick Duff, a local activist, asked for the records after he heard Hylton’s 911 call. “For her to be so calm and so cavalier and say, ‘I have two gentlemen in my store and they refuse to buy something or leave,’ it made me think that there was more to it,” he explained, the Tribune reports. “It almost sounded as if she made that call 20, 30 or 40 more times.”
The Starbucks located at 1801 Spruce Street is in an area of Philadelphia where blacks make up 3 percent of the residents. Amazingly, the American Civil Liberties Union says that 67 percent of police-related pedestrian stops in Philadelphia in the first half of 2017 involved blacks.
Maybe Hylton should join the Philadelphia Police Department.
I’m sure she’d feel right at home.