I don't appreciate your sarcastic hash tags, but I do agree with you Derec.
I saw that video on another site and I couldn't understand why so many people were insisting that the woman was over-reacting and/or racist. She MAY be racist, but it is just as likely that she is merely wrong or confused.
It IS quite easy to show someone that your phone is yours. It's a heck of a lot easier than getting into an argument. She told the kid to take off the phone case; I suspect that was to verify some identifying characteristic on the phone. Depending on the phone case, that can be usually be accomplished in less than 1 second. But this confrontation allegedly took more than 5 minutes. Why would you subject yourself to that instead of quickly and easily proving your innocence?
I am not sure if you are right. First, does a reasonable person assume someone guilty? It seems like one would think about crime demographics and stereotypes together with the missing phone and an apparent one like it observed to conclude the two are the same phone. I can't say with certainty that she included stereotypes in her method of jumping conclusions and am open-minded to being wrong if she gave an explanation in the viral video--I haven't seen it. Second, asking to remove the case seems an aspect of the unreasonable conclusion. Does she think he is a scammer who runs around with different iphone cases to trick people after he steals their phones? Maybe she is mentally ill but it seems racist stereotypes are more common than paranoia. Does she explain the phone case thing in the video?
Regarding his lack of proving innocence, I am guessing he is trying to teach her not to jump to conclusions. If someone insisted their generically cased phone was not my phone and wasn't trying to run from a crime, I'd begin retracing my steps mentally to consider other possibilities. If I had just travelled around in an uber but I called the uber with my phone, I'd conclude a reasonable alternative explanation was I left my phone in my uber.
A young black person is another human and someone else doesn't have an entitlement to assault them, if suspecting them of theft of some minor item. Where does that entitlement come from?
If it was you looking for your phone, what would you say? I'd say something like, "Look man, I'm not trying to be a dick. It seems like my phone has just disappeared. I now need to retrace my steps. You are the first person I see in proximity to where I think it disappeared and your phone looks like mine. I would like to eliminate this possibility before I move on to retrace my steps and you leave. Could you please remove the case or let me see it. Please." Then, if he said no, I'd ask my son to take a photo of him and I'd move on to retrace my steps. If I did not find my phone otherwise, I'd head to hotel security to ask them to review their camera footage. His photo would be an investigative option if my phone was not found.
Maybe. It's easy to think you can do a better job than someone else who gets caught on video. It's easy to get caught up in emotional thinking...too. But I stand by my questions as discussion points. Why not be nicer, why not begin to doubt herself, where does the entitlement come from?