In the caption of the Instagram post, he wrote, “An old white woman got on the train and immediately pointed at me and told me to correct how I was sitting. I refused, so she went to the conductor and complained. The conductor called the police and stopped the train,” he said.
O’Keefe also says in the caption that the friend of the woman who called the police had said to him, “You’re not the minority anymore.”
A separate video about the incident has been uploaded by the user, Nalae, on TikTok, where it has quickly gone viral, having been viewed over 160,000 times as of reporting.
They said I was disturbing the peace by not leaving the train. They pulled me off the train and arrested me without even talking to the Karen who reported the one black person on the train. On the platform, the police detained me and interrogated me. Only black folks stayed nearby and recorded the arrest. When I demanded a lawyer and reminded them they didn’t even take a statement from the woman who complained they eventually released me. This country is growing more psycho by the day. What will you do about it?"
You’re making a lot of assumptions. All we know is that in the end he was released, so they didn’t actually have any reason to arrest him. Whatever the issue was with how he sat, there was no basis for arrest, and probably no basis to call the police at all.
Maybe he did put his dirty shoes on the seat, but the article doesn’t tell us. Nobody does. All we know is that they wanted to arrest him, but couldn’t. Whatever he did wasn’t serious enough for it and yet they tried and held up a train for it.
It is of course only his side of the story. More info would help. But without more info, there’s no reason not to believe that he was harassed mostly just for being black. It’s not like this is the first time that happened.
Maybe he was harassed for his skin color, but this article did leave out the core of what happened. It’s just as likely the treatment was deserved: we have no information either way. The article jumps right to we should be outraged, without actually saying enough of what happened. And yes, I’ve seen assholes on the train where I really wished the conductor would intervene