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?"

  • BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Most Americans don’t realize just how deeply racist some people are in this country, I’ve seen similar behavior before from white women, towards a black kid who was just hanging around in a library, and now these shitty people feel even more emboldened.

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    3 hours ago

    This is just stupid. And I mean, the arrest. You Americans seem to be subject to arrest for the stupidest things.

    Putting your feet on a seat is gross. The guy should have complied with the indication to put them down. Non compliance should have resulted in -at most- a fine. This is what would had happened in my country, and my guess, in the majority of places in the world.

    • Entertainmeonly@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 hours ago

      Laws are written in ways they can be used at the discretion of the power. Their discretion, their prerogative, their biase, their bigotry. All laws written to apply only when the power chooses are not law, but privilege.

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    Hope he finds that woman, conductor and police chief and sues their ass (like any good it will do, but at least the internet can make a public example of her).

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      The dropdown menu just doesn’t offer them the option for ‘was on a whites only train’, prob an admin error that will be soon corrected.

      /s

      But dickishness does/should have some consequences. Obviously not handcuffs consequences tho.

      Someone not occupying more than one sit on a public transport isn’t the worst thing to gatekeep.

      How it can escalate to calling the police idk.

    • mcv@lemmy.zip
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      5 hours ago

      He did it while black. That’s clearly an arrestable offense.

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    6 hours ago

    After reading that headline, for a second I was wondering how Anton Checkov had come alive again and was on a train.

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    10 hours ago

    Conveniently, the officer body cam footage is “not available”. Absolutely insane they are making it sound like it’s his fault the train is delayed.

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    12 hours ago

    Luckily he is American. If he was a legal migrant having been booked would be considered a visa offense and he could be sent to a concentration camp.

    • SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world
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      Luckily he is American famous.

      The usual story here for Americans is that they get arrested for resisting arrest and assulting a police officer and then get sentences to 10+ years in the local gulag.

      Immigrants instead get sent to the camps for deportation.

      He’s well enough known, there were enough cameras and he’s media/white american savvy enough to avoid the worst outcomes.

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    13 hours ago

    I’m sick of the police getting involved and actually acting when no explicit law has been violated. If a law isn’t violated, they should never ever put their hands on a citizen in any way. Detaining someone without actually arresting them should result in immediate firing of the police. If you can’t press charges, you shouldn’t act.

    • GroundedGator@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Sounds like they created the violation in this case. They threatened arrest for disturbing the peace if he didn’t comply and remove himself from the train. They are always able to manufacturer reason for detainment and threatening arrest.

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        9 hours ago

        You watch the video? - They said to him stop resisting even though they hadn’t placed him under arrest. Cops abuse their power all the time. I am saying they have no right to handcuff you or even touch you or order you off a train unless you committed an actual crime that they can place you under arrest for. You shouldn’t be forced to leave a train like this if you haven’t broken any kind of standing law.

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          7 hours ago

          The police are now trained to say “stop resisting” for their body cameras, which provides the pretext for additional charges. They throw as many charges as they possibly can hoping one or two stick if it gets plead down.

          I haven’t watched the video but I totally agree that it’s inappropriate to order him off the train in this instance. They can conduct their criminal investigation right there. The fact that these incidents are allowed to get to the police is the frightening part; that people who reported him need to go to jail, and the conductor should be at a minimum investigated.

        • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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          7 hours ago

          they frame evidence all the time, either by making it up, or trying to use it as an excuse to escalate. i suspect the latter.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      That’d require them to be educated about the law but it seems awfully convenient to keep them ignorant of it.

    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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      So cops shouldnt be called when drunks and racists on planes get start yelling and delaying flights?

      Like that Burger King guy? Cops just shouldn’t have been called? Do Americans just not understand egalitarianism any more? You’re all deranged.

      Everyone gets the same rules, transport companies can kick you off, or get the police to detain-you-off the plane/train.

      There’s literally thousands of videos of people being thrown of public transport, it happens EVERYDAY whenever anyone refuses to obey the rules.

      Fucken, Americans are mentally ill, I swear. This shit is obvious in the rest of the world.

      • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        You resorting to ad hominem insteading of sticking to the facts and the arguments paints you in bad faith.

        If you want upvotes next time, maybe don’t do that.

        • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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          14 minutes ago

          I don’t care about imaginary Internet points… And I’ve linked and quoted multiple articles. People don’t care for the facts, they’re stuck in political perspectives

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        8 hours ago

        Drunk and Disorderly conduct is a crime. I didn’t say cops can’t be called - I said unless they are arresting you to charge you with a crime they shouldn’t be able to detain you, remove you from a train, or claim you are resisting. This ensures they are only intervening when an actual crime was committed. It puts them in a position to have to defend their initial arrest in court and not just harass people and get away with it because they didn’t technically arrest them - which is the case here. Assuming from your statement you aren’t from America so you don’t know how much police harass people outside of actual arrests here. They will ask you to comply without an arrest to whatever unreasonable demand they make. Then, if you don’t comply with something unreasonable, they will claim you were resisting, and then charge you with resisting. It’s designed to create a charge where there was none to begin with. Police do that all the time over here, especially to minorities.

        • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          Not what happened here though. He was taken off the train, released and told to get the next train.

          • RandomlyGeneratedName@lemmy.world
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            Also, the video shows them saying “stop resisting.” They were attempting to do just what I said, but a lot of people started recording, and this guy started saying how famous he was so the police thought better of it. Without the bystander cameras and the fame of the person involved it likely would’ve been handled much different.

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            What exactly was the reasoning for taking him off the train that justifies it? Because an old woman didn’t like the way he was sitting? That is the only justification listed anywhere. Is that the only standard necessary to remove this man from his paid for train ride, not to mention police harassing him? Why is his much greater discomfort less important than that ladies? Why does that random old lady get to dictate anything? Why does the train conductor have no responsibility to this other paid customer - he just stops the train due to this old ladies discomfort that has no legal backing? I just can’t see a justification for the way this situation was handled.

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            That’s what they’re saying. They’re saying that the police should need more than just the bare minimum investigation of a potential crime to remove you from transit. You’re saying that he was released as if the only two options were not taking him off the train and jailing him indefinitely.

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    15 hours ago

    “You’re not the minority anymore.”

    Jesus fucking Christ.

    This says so much. They think “minority” means a person who gets special treatment. That’s how fucking deluded they’ve become.

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      Thank you. I’ve been looking for a single comment to explain the lunatic doublespeak she was using.

      MAGA is literally a cult of fascism.

    • TheHighRoad@lemmy.world
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      I honestly had trouble parsing that statement until I read this comment; it was nice being stupid and ignorant for a minute.

    • jjagaimo@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      Its a tale as old as time that they’d strip protections against racism, implement racist laws, and then pretend as if slavery was so long ago that it didn’t matter anymore. It was literally happening not a decade after the Civil War ended

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      15 hours ago

      That… explains so much. Racists are fucking jealous that black people get to be oppressed??? Is it like some martyrdom by proxy fuckedupedness?

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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        on reddit, people said racist white people like that are afraid they do the same thing to them, of how they persecuted the blacks, so they act extra “im not racist, your being racist for calling out my race”. they also try to deflect white privilege as a non-existential issue.

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        Sorta. I was raised with this bullshit, so I can see the distortion of reality. I’m still unpacking all this in therapy myself, because it’s a whole worldview.

        First off, they’re woefully uneducated about history. My high school in Oklahoma briefly touched on the Civil Rights Movement and tried to pass it off as something that was over and done. Rosa Parks got arrested, the white people were shocked that this could happen, they had a sit-in party at a milkshake stand (they didn’t talk about any of the pushback that got), MLK did his speech and now everything is fine for black people, no more institutional racism, literally being taught in schools. Now, combine that with your own needs not being met, and the talking heads/politicans say that you’re not getting the aid you need because it’s going towards making hurt feelings better. There’s only so much money in the coffers, and you gotta be really hard up if you’re white, but it’s easy to get if you’re black.

        There’s also a heavy religious framing about ancestral guilt. Like, if God can make life suck for everybody because Eve ate an apple, and libs are trying to play god, it follows to reason they’d want to make your life suck for the sins of your great-great-great grandparents. It’s never outright stated, but if you listen to enough sermons, the puzzle fills in. Like, again, they think the civil rights movement fixed everything, so they think white people have atoned for their transgressions, but the pastor says libs are in consort with satan and can’t forgive like jesus, so that’s why they want white people to suffer.

        Edit: I want to make it clear that I do not personally believe any of that, it’s just what I was taught as a kid.

        • TheseusNow@lemmy.zip
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          This is why the term “color blind” is used by someone trying to go the right way, but still not getting it, which leads to the ignorance of their racism. In being blind you are blind to the fact that racism still exist and isn’t fixed. Then that leads to incorrect beliefs like “minorities are getting special priveleges and when they don’t have the same quality of life it is because of their own poor behavior” as opposed to acknowledging the systemic racism still in place.

        • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          11 hours ago

          I appreciate you identifying where in the GOP’s propaganda they lead young people astray.

          People like you doing a retrospective autobiopsy via therapy can help those of growing up in other contexts protect young people from propaganda, and distribute to them the truth.

          Speak your truth! It’s only becoming more important as time goes on in this increasingly fascistic world.

        • RFKJrsBrainworm@sh.itjust.works
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          12 hours ago

          My favorite part of this is the only people making the ignorant racist lives suck are the Republicans taking everything not the left asking them to be tolerant…

          • Signtist@bookwyr.me
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            It’s like that comic about the guy with a plateful of cookies telling one guy that ta third guy is going to take his singular cookie. There are 2 types of republicans - one that takes, and one that gets taken from just as much as the left. The prior group has convinced the latter group that the actual thief is the left, who are in just as bad of a position as they are, if not worse. That’s why they can’t believe it. They’re not taking everything, at least not enough to make ends meet most of the time, same as us. It’s the much smaller fraction of rich republicans that are doing the taking. The issue is that they can’t believe that truth, and so they lash out and become a completely different problem.

        • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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          thats because they are afraid of the power and riches they accumulated through subjugating minorities, will be used against them in retribution, so they go the extra mile , with the help aristocrats/oligarchs to keep the status quo. also white people are extra defensive when discussing racism as well. even if they arnt outwardly racist(closeted racist), i witness how they act around people that are not white , especially when they either look or approach near them.

          during covid, like in the midst of it a older white lady dint like i was getting on the train the same time i was, she said it was not nice to go before “an older lady”, i muttered bitch under my breath, you would do that to another white man or lady, but you would do that to a POC, because you will get immediate clapback from a white person over a POC. AS FAR as covid was concerned she wasnt masked, or properly masked. the entrance to train was large enough where 2 people can get on the same time.

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    13 hours ago

    The sad part is this happens all the time for non-famous people of color and the outcomes are worse. Often the cops will throw them in jail for “resisting” or some other made up bullshit charge. His fame and the cameras saved him from likely worse outcomes.

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    15 hours ago

    It’s a terrifying time to be alive. I highly recommend people in the left buy guns and train with them.

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      While I agree in general, that wouldn’t have helped in this case, and likely would have just made things worse. He couldn’t draw on the Karen for being a racist piece of trash, and his next interaction was with the police, whom he certainly couldn’t have drawn on. Then the cops would have trumped up the charges because he was armed, and he never would have seen the gun again after it disappeared into the evidence locker.

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      13 hours ago

      and train with them

      with each other

      It helps with organization, which is what actually wins both movements and wars