With the new policy, there won’t be a 27th phone call to the police.
Via Tampa Bay Times:
She didn’t mean to, but inside Starbucks with her headphones on, Amanda Adams got comfortable and fell asleep. Two police officers woke her and escorted her outside.
“It was humiliating,” the 34-year-old said. “I didn’t realize I fell asleep. To be woke up like that, it’s just embarrassing.”
As a homeless woman, she knows that sleeping in Starbucks could get her charged with trespassing.
What Adams doesn’t know is that employees of that Starbucks, at 199 First Ave. N in downtown St. Petersburg, have called police to remove homeless people more often than most stores in the Tampa Bay area.
The Seattle-based coffee company faced days of protests after a store manager called police on two black men who sat in a cafe without ordering in mid-April. The two, waiting to discuss real estate with a third man, were charged with trespassing.
The company promised to train its nearly 175,000 employees on “racial-bias education” on Tuesday, when it closes its 8,000 locations for a day. Starbucks decreed that all customers may now have access to its public spaces and bathrooms, whether they buy something or not.
The company wants people to think of Starbucks as a “third place” — coming after work and home. But for those without a job or a house, Starbucks is sometimes the “first place.”
The majority of trespass calls made by some of the busiest Starbucks in the Tampa Bay area were complaints about homeless people, the Tampa Bay Times found.
The Times looked at 65 free-standing Starbucks in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco Counties. Between 2013 and 2018, employees and sometimes patrons of those locations called law enforcement 1,039 times for complaints related to trespassing.
The Starbucks where Adams fell asleep had 95 of these calls in five years, according to records reviewed by the Times. More than half were requests to get rid of homeless people, and 24 ended in an arrest or the person being banned for a year.
In 2015, Calvin Williams, who was then 65, walked into the First Avenue Starbucks and declared it to be his, according to police reports.
“This is my Starbucks,” Williams said with arms crossed to police.
During a four-month span between 2015 and 2016, Williams was arrested 10 times at the store on First Avenue and once at the Starbucks at 900 Fourth St. N.
Asked why he kept coming back, Williams told police, “I own the Starbucks and the property it is on, and the employees and customers should be the people who are trespassed from it.”
The current store manager referred a reporter to the Starbucks corporate office, which pointed to a policy posted online this month.
“When using a Starbucks space, we respectfully request that customers behave in a manner that maintains a warm and welcoming environment,” it said, requesting that customers use spaces as intended, be considerate, communicate with respect and act responsibly.
Two previous managers of locations in the Tampa Bay area were willing to share their experiences.
Homeless arrest numbers do not surprise Dana Nichols, 30, who spent four of his six years with the company as shift manager and barista at the First Avenue location.
Nichols made many of those calls to police. He said he ultimately lost his job for flipping off a customer who began recording a police trespass call.
Most Starbucks locations get homeless people, Nichols said, but he seemed to get the disruptive ones.
Close to two years later, he still remembers Williams. Nichols said he would give Williams free water and let him stay as long as he behaved, but Williams would aggressively panhandle customers, shout and get angry with staff.
HT: Snaptie