Police Falsely Accuse Black Students of Dining-and-Dashing at Clayton, Mo., IHOP
If black people are treated white people like they treat us it be a national emergency.
Another day, another just-existing while black incident, where ten Washington University students — all black and incoming freshmen — got the welcome of their lives at a Clayton, Mo., IHOP after they were accused of dining and dashing.
Well, the “dashing” part is a strong reach. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the students were stopped by Clayton police earlier this month while walking to a MetroLink stop after their late-night dinner. That was when the students were told that they were being accused of leaving the IHOP restaurant without paying.
This is where it gets better (and by better, I mean invariably unconscionable). Some of the students presented their receipts to show that they had indeed paid for their meals, nonetheless, the police made them walk all the way back to the restaurant, following them with six squad cars. However, when they reached the restaurant, the manager informed officers that they had the wrong people, and they were not the ones who had left without paying.
The officers then dismissed them without apology.
So you can probably guess what happened, at least in the officers’ case here. The only word cops seemed to have pick up on was “black” and gathered the first group of black kids they could find, again despite the fact that these students presented receipts.
“Needless to say, the students were shaken and upset,” Rob Wild, associate vice chancellor for student transition and engagement wrote in an email last week to other administrators at Washington University. “This is obviously extremely disappointing. Not how any of us would like to welcome our new students.”
Wild said in his email that the students “did not really appear to fit the description of the suspects other than being black.”