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Philadelphia police are conducting an internal investigation into a viral video that shows officers handcuffing and removing two black men from the premises of a Starbucks store.
“The police were called because these men hadn’t ordered anything,” tweeted author Melissa DePino, who posted a video of the arrest on Thursday. “They were waiting for a friend to show up, who did as they were taken out in handcuffs for doing nothing. All the other white ppl are wondering why it’s never happened to us when we do the same thing.”
DePino told local news outlet Billy Penn that the incident happened Thursday afternoon and that a friend of hers shot the video.
The clip shows what appears to be a white man in a vest questioning why an arrest is taking place. He seems to be the person who was planning to meet the black men at Starbucks.
“What did they get called for?” the man asks an officer. “’Cause there are two black guys sitting here meeting me?”
The officer’s response is not intelligible in the video.
The same man then asks the officer, “What did they do?” while another voice can be heard saying, “They didn’t do anything. I saw the entire thing.”
Philly Voice pointed to a second, longer video uploaded to YouTube that shows an officer telling the man in the vest that the other two individuals were being arrested for “trespassing.” The man calls what the officers are doing “discrimination.”
Ben Waxman, a spokesman for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, told HuffPost that the two men were released at 1:30 a.m. Saturday. He said the DA will not bring charges against them.
“We declined to bring charges against the two men because there was a lack of evidence that a crime was committed,” Waxman said.
Neither Starbucks nor the Philadelphia Police Department immediately replied to HuffPost’s request for comment. However, both have made statements on social media.
The police department tweeted Friday evening that it was “aware” of the incident and was launching an internal investigation into what happened.
Starbucks tweeted the same night that it was “reviewing the incident with our partners, law enforcement and customers to determine what took place and led to this unfortunate result.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly quoted the man in the vest as saying, “’Cause there are two black guys sitting here eating?” He actually said, “’Cause there are two black guys sitting here meeting me?”
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