#PermitPatty: Weed Entrepreneur Calls Police On Eight Year Old Selling Water

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Social media has dubbed her #Permit Patty and she reminds us quite a bit of Barbecue Becky, the last white woman to be caught calling the police on black people minding their business. Her real name is Allison Ettel, and she was caught in a tense video by the cousin of a little girl trying to sell water in front of her house during a San Fransisco Giant’s home game. The clip is short but includes Ettel hiding from the cameras as she is confronted, and nervously repeating a line about a lack of water selling permit.

When the cousin points out that the little girl is selling water in front of her property, Ettel smugly responds, “It’s not your property” which feels like a real stretch, and maybe, maybe an attempt to rob a little girl of color of a sense of ownership. Not great!

The girl’s cousin, who goes as Raj, or @_ethiopiangold on Twitter, posted a video of the tiny entrepreneur in question selling water, and Raj posted a photo of Ettel next to the woman known as #BBQBecky, the Oakland resident who called the police on black people having a barbecue, dubbing her #PermitPatty.

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Ettel gave an interview to Huffington Post where she told them she wasn’t actually calling the police but pretending to, and it was the noise which was an issue for her, which still sounds like coded racism to us. Let’s let Ettel put it in her own words to Huffpost:

“They were screaming about what they were selling… It was literally nonstop. It was every two seconds, ‘Come and buy my water.’ It was continuous and it wasn’t a soft voice, it was screaming.”

Although Ettel claims that there is not racism intended in her actions, the history of police violence against people of color, and the recent spate of white people using that as a weapon or a threat — from the Yale student who called the police on a classmate napping in a common room, to Aaron Shlossberg, the NYC lawyer who threatened to call ICE on Spanish speaking restaurant workers — makes Ettel’s claims that this was not racially biased suspect.

Call the police as a last resort, folks. As we’ve reported in the past, the police are not known to treat people of color particularly well.

Plus, if the potentially violent harrassment of a human being is not enough, the social consequences of calling the cops on a person who isn’t doing anything are not nothing.

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A weird — and ironic twist to all this — is that Ettel managed a company that made THC (marijuana) for dogs, called Treatwell Tinctures. In light of the video coming out, Ettel has been dropped by several distributors. Oops. Can’t be racist in the dog marijuana industry. Ruff!

https://twitter.com/WillHunterShow/status/1010694561801179138

What do you think of this incident? Do you see a pattern between all these people calling the police on people of color doing nothing or will you wait until it’s too late? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter at @WhatsTrending.

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