A white cop has been accused of racial profiling after stopping two or more Black women coming out of a TJ Maxx and claiming someone had accused them of shoplifting. The women were made to go back into the store and hand over the bags of what they had bought along with the receipts proving that every item was accounted for. They began recording inside the shop as the officer began to change his story, both claiming that the alleged person who made the shoplifting accusation did and did not work at the store.
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The Black women, along with millions of people who have viewed the TikTok videos documenting this incident, believe that the officer stopped them because of their race and simply hoped that they had stolen something, knowing he could get away with it. However, the women in the video were determined not to let that be the case, tired as so many Black folks are of having to fear being accused of crime every time they step outside.
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The first video, viewed 2.8 million times in the space of two days, shows the cop changing his story multiple times on different details.
“He goin’ stop us outside and say somebody called on us that we were suspicious,” explains one of the women into the camera. “So I came back in with my receipt, and everything on it, that I bought my s–t. Why would I steal from TJ Maxx?”
TJ Maxx likely does see the occasional case of shoplifting and no offense to them or anything, but it is literally a shop that takes the things other stores can’t sell and peddles them for cheap, so serious shoplifters would be a little weird for targeting this particular chain. More importantly, however, is the fact that there does not seem to be any evidence at all that these women stole anything and the officer fails to produce the supposed individual who made the accusation.
After the women demand that the officer produces the accuser, who he claims is Black, he says that they’ll “come out in a second,” but this never happens. He then tries to say that “if there’s no problem then there’s no problem,” at which point the officer gets a crash course in the fact that it’s not only embarrassing to be publicly accused of shoplifting and paraded back into the store by a cop, it’s part of a pattern of racism in the U.S. that is exhausting and literally killing people.
By the end of the video, the women demand that all of their items be returned so they can get their money back. In additional videos, the cop tries to cover himself by claiming that there are other bags in the women’s car that need to be checked because the receipts only cover what was in the bags they were carrying out to the car. Apparently, he thinks these ladies have the audacity to shoplift before returning to the same store to legally purchase items.
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The women, of course, point out that the bags in the car are from other stores because sometimes people go to multiple locations on the same shopping trip. The cop then tries to make a stink about their being more receipts than women, and a Black man who had stepped in as a bystander has to explain receipts to him.
When contacted by the Daily Dot, a TJ Maxx spokesperson denied that any employee of the store called the police on the women and confirmed that the officer has no affiliation with the company.
“We can confirm that the plainclothes detective and police officers seen on this video do not work for our company, and that the Associates working in our store did not initiate these actions,” said their statement. “Involvement from our Associates was at the direct request of law enforcement.”
*First Published: July 8, 2021, 12:51 pm
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