Another day, another incident of a white person calling the cops on a black people for no reason.
The most recent incident blew up on social media Saturday when a white woman in San Francisco threatened to call the cops on an eight-year-old black girl. The girl’s apparent crime was selling water without a permit across from the AT&T stadium, SFGate.com reports.
The girl’s mother, Erin Austin, shot a video of herself confronting the white woman, now identified as Alison Ettel, and posted it on her Instagram.
“This woman don’t want a little girl to sell some water, she’s calling the police on an 8-year-old girl,” Austin is heard saying.
Ettel can be seen on the phone, ducking to hide once she realizes she is being recorded.
“Yeah, and um, illegally selling water without a permit?” she says into the phone.
“On my property,” Austin responds. Her daughter had been selling the water outside the family’s apartment building.
“It’s not your property,” Ettel says.
The recording then switches off.
The video has gone viral on social media with the hashtag #PermitPatty. Many are linking it to other recent incidents in which a white person has called the police on a black person doing simple life tasks like sitting at Starbucks or barbecuing in a park.
Ettel, who has a marijuana business, defended herself to the Huffington Post, telling the publication that the issue had nothing to do with race.
Ettel says that her problem was with Austin, who she says had been “screaming about what they were selling.”
“It was literally nonstop. It was every two seconds, ‘Come and buy my water.’ It was continuous and it wasn’t a soft voice, it was screaming,” Ettel says, while also admitting that she only pretended to call the cops.
“It was stupid,” she said. “I completely regret that I handled that so poorly. It was completely stress-related, and I should have never confronted her. That was a mistake, a complete mistake. Please don’t make me sound horrible.”
As for Austin, she told USA Today that she recently lost her job and her daughter was trying to raise money because she wanted to go to Disneyland.
When she was told about Ettel’s regrets about the incident, Austin’s response was simple: “She did it to herself.