You arrested a successful businesswoman in her own store, and then treated her like a criminal because your racism wouldn’t allow you to believe a black woman could own a luxury boutique. This sentence must reflect the severity of your abuse of power. The judge sentenced Patterson to 8 years in state prison. The city settled Amara Bennett’s civil rights lawsuit for the full $680,000 rather than face a jury trial where damages could have been even higher. The settlement was the largest racial profiling payout in a retail case in the state’s history.
As part of the agreement, the police department was required to implement comprehensive reforms including mandatory bias training for all officers, an independent civilian oversight board to investigate complaints, immediate suspension for any officer with patterns of racial bias complaints, and quarterly public reports on arrest statistics broken down by race. Police Chief Donald Morrison was forced to resign after it was revealed he had personally dismissed three of the complaints against Patterson over the years without proper investigation. Internal Affairs conducted a department-wide audit and identified 37 officers with complaint patterns similar to Patterson’s. Multiple excessive force or wrongful arrest complaints filed primarily by minorities, all inadequately investigated or dismissed. 22 of those officers were fired.
15 were placed on final warning with mandatory retraining and supervision. Patricia Patterson faced social and financial ruin even though she wasn’t criminally charged. Her identity as the woman who called police on a black business owner went viral with over 60 million views across all platforms. Her country club revoked her membership. Her friends stopped returning her calls.
Her part-time job at a charity organization terminated her after donors threatened to pull funding if she remained associated with them. She became nationally known as the Karen who destroyed her husband’s career and sent him to prison. And that reputation followed her everywhere she went. Jennifer, the sales associate who had been fired for siding with Patterson, found herself unemployable in retail after the incident. Her face was in multiple viral videos supporting the false arrest of her own boss.
When she applied for jobs, hiring managers would Google her name and find the videos. She ended up working fast food for minimum wage carrying the permanent stain of being the employee who told the business owner to leave. Amara Bennett used $200,000 of her settlement to establish the Equality and Inclusion Foundation, a non-profit organization that provided legal assistance to victims of racial profiling in retail and business settings and offered anti-bias training for retail employees and managers. The foundation helped 96 people in its first 3 years, many of them black shoppers who had been followed, questioned, or falsely accused of shoplifting by store employees or security guards who assumed they were the criminals. Bennett’s business experienced significant growth after the incident.
