Why Did Cup Foods Call the Cops on George Floyd?

(Source nytimes.com) Ever since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers on May 25 after a grocery store reported that he had used a counterfeit $20 there, Muslim Americans have been asking why the store’s workers called the cops in the first place. Like many grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods, Cup Foods is owned and largely staffed by an immigrant Muslim family, and the police call has prompted some to see racist motives. Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, the Palestinian-American owner of Cup Foods, the grocery store, was away when a 17-year-old worker made the call. A statement from the store referred to a “state policy that requires stores” to notify the police about counterfeit bills and Mr. Abumayyaleh described the practice as “standard protocol” for businesses. He vowed that his store will no longer do so “until the police stop killing innocent people.” Nuisance abatement laws have been used similarly nationwide, including at Cup Foods. These laws are part of what is known as “third-party policing,” which transforms immigrant businesses into nodes of surveillance, expands the power of the police and the courts, and drives wedges between vulnerable communities.  The facts of third-party policing do not take away from the need for conversations about anti-black racism within Muslim American communities. Although Muslim Americans routinely have to deal with the bigotry of Islamophobia, many have been in denial for far too long about the anti-black racism among the believers. About a third of American Muslims are African-American and the history of Islam in the United States is deeply connected to the African-American story. Yet research by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, which studies American Muslims, shows that African-American Muslims still often feel unwelcome in South Asian and Arab Muslim circles.