California Cops Demand Black Store Owner Show ID in his Own Shop (Watch)

*A video showing California police officers demanding that a Black shop owner show proof that he owned the store has gone viral.

Yema Khalif owns Yema clothing store in the Boardwalk Shopping Center on Main St. in the town of Tiburon. He and two other people – including his wife, Hawi Awash, who also runs the store – were unloading inventory in the wee hours of Saturday morning when cops rolled up asking to see his ID.

Yema, owner of the only Black-owned clothing store in the town, according to Khalif, took issue with the police demand. Watch an ABC 7 News report on the story below, followed by the entire unedited incident posted to Instagram.

Watch the unedited incident below, or here on Instagram.

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View this post on Instagram

 

Last night we had a not so good exchange with Tiburon police at our place of work.  YEMA is the only black owned clothing store in Tiburon, California so many people in our community know who we are.   Some days we have to work late. Yesterday was one of those days. We received new inventory during the day so we went back to our store, on Main street Tiburon California, to work late. One of our business friend was visiting us from washing DC so he came with us. This is around 1AM. FYI, a popular restaurant close to us was still open and I could see their employees working late. We are inside the store minding our business, All store lights are on and you can see us from outside because we have high windows all around the store.  Our store alarm did not go off, no one called the police, everything was peaceful.  Then we see Tiburon police car patrolling. We saw him drive around the block like 3 times. At one point he stopped across our store for a good minute. Then finally, the cop decided to come knock on our store door. FYI, we didn’t realize that when he was circling the block he was calling for back up.  I opened the door for him then he proceeded to tell me his purpose for knocking on our door was to check what we were doing at the store that late. And he wanted us to prove who we are. His tone not very like-able.  I expressed to him that there was no crime going on and we were going about our business. Then he insisted that he wanted us to prove who we are and to explain what we were doing at the store that late. I, kindly, explained that we didn’t have to prove anything and asked for a supervisor.  That’s when we knew he had already called for back up. Supervisor and another cop – who had his hand on his gun, by the way, showed up almost immediately. The supervisor came charged and did not come to deescalate anything.  The situation started getting out of hand so our friend from DC started recording the exchange (Video below). @shaunking @beyonce @chakabars @lauraharrier @buzzfeed @nowthisnews @aljazeeraenglish @cnn @bbcnews @latimes @nytimes @wsj @ava @shondarhimes @kuz @kingjames @oprah @voguemagazine @essence @adutakech @tiffanyhaddish

A post shared by YEMA™ (@yemacalif) on Aug 21, 2020 at 3:33pm PDT