Alison Ettel, the 44-year-old white woman from San Francisco who claims she asked politely for 8-year-old Jordan Rogers, an African-American, to sell her water more quietly. She also said she’d only pretended to call police on the child in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. But Bay Area TV station KTVU obtained the 911 recording and it tells another story.
“…911 what’s you location,” the emergency dispatcher asks. “Oh, yes. I’m on the sidewalk …I have someone who does not have a vendor permit who’s selling water across from the ball park.” The dispatcher takes a few moments to respond, “Uh …” She asks, “Is there someone I can talk to about that?” He hesitates for a moment then offers to transfer her to police. “Great, thank you.” He connects her and the call ends.
KTVU reported the call came in as a “suspicious person” report and confirmed the call came from Ettel’s cell phone number.
Ettel told NBC’s Today Show she politely said, “Please, I’m trying to work. You’re screaming, you’re yelling.” Rogers mother Erin Austin said that never happened. She said Ettel “just came out and demanded to see a permit from an 8-year-old.”
Known on the internet as #PermitPatty, Ettel, who has two master’s degrees, co-founded a medical marijuana business. She was forced to resign from the cannabis company she founded, Treatwell, after a number of industry businesses criticized her rant and call to police captured on cell phone video by Austin.
AT&T Park, where the San Francisco Giants played the San Diego Padres that Friday, is across from Rigers and Austin’s apartment. Rogers can be seen in one video smiling with a rolling cooler, announcing, “Cold water $2. Cold water $2” for baseball fans.
Austin began filming and Ettel, on the phone and calling police, tried to hide by ducking down around a concrete wall on the sidewalk. Austin says, “…you can hide all you want. The whole world gonna see you, boo,” Ettel comes from her hiding spot and says, “Yeah. Illegally selling water without a permit? Yeah.”
Ettel told national media including the Huffington Post, that she feigned the call, which the 911 audio has now debunked.
“They were screaming about what they were selling,” she told HuffPo. “It was literally nonstop. It was every two seconds, ‘Come and buy my water.’ It was continuous and it wasn’t a soft voice, it was screaming.”
Ettel said she suffered for hours with the screaming and “snapped.” She said it stressed her out and now, she claims, she’s getting threats and feels “discriminated against.”
“It was stupid,” she told HuffPo. “I completely regret that I handled that so poorly. It was completely stress-related, and I should have never confronted her. That was a mistake, a complete mistake. Please don’t make me sound horrible.”
#PermitPatty was likened to #BBQBecky, Jennifer Schulte, the Oakland woman who called police to report a black family having a BBQ in a park where she said no charcoal grills were permitted. It was reported later that Schulte was “evaluated for an involuntary psychiatric hold” after the incident. She too went viral after calling police and telling a 911 dispatcher that black people were using a charcoal grill in a “non-designated area in Lake Merritt park.”
The internet blew up on #PermitPatty for what The Root described as, “Calling Police on Black People For No Damn Reason.”
