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?"
This is what happens when a malignant narcissist emboldens abd enables the racist sociopaths.
whoever wrote the article sucks
The article is purposely misleading.
From another article: The Bear’ writer booted from MTA train for refusing to take feet off seats — he blames ‘old white lady’
Real question, is feet-on-the-seat something people are typically arrested for there?
Why do you trust that article more than this one? Did you see his feet on the seat?
lmfao jesus the misleadingness of it
get your fucking feet off the seat or get off the train
if they leave that out, I trust nothing they said about how the rest of it went
I’ve personally seen a fully nude homeless man sleeping stretched out on a 6 train’s seats, his garbage bag full of belongings strewn about the car. He smelled so bad there was no one else in the train car. The cops were not called. Or if they were they didn’t show up at any of the stations we passed.
Sure it sucks, but involving the police in someone having their feet on the seat? Way to overreact.
Pretty standard for disorderly passengers in the subway. Nothing really novel about this.
I’ve rode the subway for over 20 years and have not once ever seen the cops called for anything less than a fist fight.
There was a video about attempting to arrest someone eating a sandwich when it wasn’t allowed. You have to enforce the rules for people who refuse to stop after a warning otherwise there’s no point in having any rules at all.
It seems petty but it’s only petty by the person refusing to follow them
The conductor was being ignored, he controls what happens on his train.
Her comment of “you aren’t the minority anymore” starts to make some sense maybe.
Like I infer his refusal to take feet off seat and then claim persecution when consequences happen, are nothing to do with him being black minority being picked on. So she is inferring he is being treated just like anyone else.
But I have no way to verify that assumption
I feel like a crazy person reading all of your comments saying it’s justified to call the cops and arrest someone for having their feet on the seats.
Anti-social behaviour on this level should not have people reaching for the state violence button.
I’m not saying cops need to come, but a conductor or ship captain gets to make the rules and people have to follow them or get asked to leave, like he was. If nobody has to listen to travel provider authority then there is zero order. Imagine being on a plane and refusingbto buckle up…you get removed, because ifbyou can’t follow an easy rule you are going to be a bigger problem in flight
The plane thing makes sense because in turbulence that person’s body could injure others, but feet on the seat does not rise to that level.
The worst thing this giu should’ve been subjected to is some harsh comments from the other passengers.
I don’t know where you live but transit has rules, you cause issues by not following rules then the bus driver stops and waits for you to get off, or if you refuse then transit police come to remove you.
As somebody else mentioned now passengers have to sit in whatever shit, or piss, or gum, etc he stepped in on his travels.
I think what happened here seems harsh, but he might have been a belligerent asshole so was asked to be removed for passenger safety.
I hope somebody captures video so we have clarity.
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.
The “You’re not the minority anymore” part was what made me do a double take. The level of delusion these people engage in is absolutely insane.
Yeah I can’t make sense of it… Does she mean like, great replacement theory happened, and that white people were the minority now?
There’s a lot in this story that could use clarification, but that quote takes the cake. And I would love to know, were that even true, how in the world it justifies what was to follow. I’m not deranged enough to just get this.
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.
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.
That must be the “freedom” everyone is talking about…
Still trying to figure out which felonies get you deported and which ones get you a seat at the table. Starting to think its not about laws at all here.
It’$ not ju$t about badly-written law$, and it help$ if you do it the white way.
A “seat at the table” these days requires a heady mix of culpability, and wealthy/connected enough to be useful to someone more powerful. Just monied or just a phone-call away from prison ain’t gonna cut it. That said, the clowns we see doing this are at the kid’s table.
They hate us for it.
non-compliance should result in getting booted from the train, not just a fine
And if they won’t, especially if they’re belligerent (we don’t know), it’s fair for the operator to have the police remove them.
There’s a lot missing from the story and it is written for racist outrage, but it’s also plausible it was some self-centered asshole getting what he deserved
Immediately pointed to me and told me to correct how I was sitting.
Old white women try to remember it’s not 1952 challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
deleted by creator
Sitting? While black? That’s a paddlin’.
sitting menacingly, -COPs
He’s sitting right towards us!
So he was sitting improperly? They didn’t say exactly why it was ‘improper’ to begin with?
He did it while black. That’s clearly an arrestable offense.
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.
The story never specified what the guy did though.
It’s important to know enough facts, yeah.
The article is purposely misleading.
From another article: The Bear’ writer booted from MTA train for refusing to take feet off seats — he blames ‘old white lady’
Maybe he had his shoes on the seats and is now crying racism.
If he had his feet up on another seat, and said “go fuck yourself” instead of “no” (which is a scenario compatible with the description). He still shouldn’t have been arrested.
I disagree. If the conductor tells someone to stop being an asshole and they curse back, they’re belligerent and noncompliant, and it’s reasonable to have the police remove them from the train.
I disagree. If the conductor tells someone to stop being an asshole and they curse back, they’re belligerent and noncompliant, and it’s reasonable to have the police remove them from the train.
Cool, but that’s not disagreeing with what I said.
He still shouldn’t have been arrested.
it’s reasonable to have the police remove them from the train.
…If the conductor tells someone…
Remove from the train ≠ arrested
“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.
That… explains so much. Racists are fucking jealous that black people get to be oppressed??? Is it like some martyrdom by proxy fuckedupedness?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Sometimes, but not always. I used to call myself colorblind, but I could see how the cops treated my black friends worse than they treated me. At one point, they rounded us up waiting at the bus stop (there was an abandoned restaurant by the bus stop, and the cops said we were trying to break in), and all my POC friends got frisked, but I was the only blonde girl, so I just got a talking to about how “hanging out with the wrong crowd will ruin my life”. Some of those kids are working on their PhD now, so “wrong crowd”, kiss my ass.
I understood “colorblind” as a “skin tone has no bearing on how I interact with you, we’re all human”.
I always thought that “everybody gets treated the same at first, adjust as we go along” was respectful, but then moved to the west coast and it’s apparently a horribly racist thing to do here, and I don’t understand why?? Something about how black people are going through struggles I can’t understand, but I also thought that everybody had struggles I don’t know about?
Like, if I don’t make assumptions about somebody in a wheelchair, it’s a good thing and not ableist, but if I don’t make assumptions about a black person, it’s a bad thing and racist? I have never been able to understand how people up here think it’s less racist to stereotype an ethnicity.
There’s also the problem with white “leftists” up here not actually knowing any POC and getting it from fucking facebook memes. Like, I had a white person once tell me, in all seriousness, that me saying “hey, what’s up” is appropriating AAVE and the correct thing to say in greeting to a black person is “I see and respect our differences”. I said that sounded patronizing as fuck, and she said I should join the kkk with that attitude.
Unlearning racism has been an awful experience, really. I’m listening to what black people say they want, but that’s somehow still racist, and I’m so close to just giving up and doing what feels right to me.
Colorblind is removing their identity.
You are still a black, white, brown, etc. person (I’m using {color} from now on cause I don’t want to type an array of colors each time). The person’s experiences as a {color} person are valid.
While you shouldn’t treat someone different because they are {color}, you should validate that they ARE different and celebrate those differences in an appropriate fashion.
It’s like a friend coming out to you and you reply “I don’t care”, while that is not the worst way to respond and you mean well, you are invalidating WHO they are.
I think this is much more eloquently illustrates my point: https://youtu.be/91O7q7D4xnU
Consider therapy. It helps
Consider therapy. It helps
Thanks, you must have missed where I said I’m slowly unpacking all this in therapy. My therapist says I’m doing good, and that I’m not a racist monster because I’m putting in the effort, but that doesn’t seem to be a common definition. In any case, I don’t call myself colorblind any more, even if I don’t understand why, people do react poorly, so I don’t do it any more. This is retrospective.
It’s like a friend coming out to you and you reply “I don’t care”, while that is not the worst way to respond and you mean well, you are invalidating WHO they are.
But when I called myself ‘colorblind’ I wasn’t saying “I don’t care”, I was saying “Okay, tell me what that means”.
Like, when I came out, I absolutely hated how big of a deal people made about it. I had people “validate that I was different”, but it felt like they were just making fun of me for being different because it was all weirdly patronizing. All this nonsense about “it’s okay that you like boys and girls, you’re still my friend” when I’m an adult who is into men and women, and I wouldn’t have started hanging out with you if I thought you didn’t like gay people? I’m still me, I haven’t changed, and stroking my ego is just telling me that you feel weird around me now that you know I’m not ‘normal’.
I still felt stereotyped and unwelcome, even though they were being “inclusive”, and I don’t want to do that to black people. I don’t understand why that’s racist.
They honestly think that black people and minorities have it on easy street.
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.
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.
Yep. It’s like a child fighting for the attention of an abusive parent.
I honestly had trouble parsing that statement until I read this comment; it was nice being stupid and ignorant for a minute.
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
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.
They should be made to understood what it means to be a minority if they want that status.
Moreover, throw them in jail legitimately, since they misused the justice system.
Cops are racists.
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.
I don’t like the headline. He has a name, you know, and it’s Alex O’keefe.
The headline makes it sound like he did something wrong too. Instead he was harassed because of a Karen
Idk to me it was clear he did nothing wrong. In that case it would have said “because he did X ans Y” instead of basically “because of a Karen”
Yeah, total bullshit.
the final form of a karen, an old/ elderly white lady.
How does one sit “offensively” on a train? All the coverage of this seems to just skip over that. Was he sitting with no pants? Laying across 3 seats? This is a novel one for me.
The article is purposely misleading.
From another article: The Bear’ writer booted from MTA train for refusing to take feet off seats — he blames ‘old white lady’
Aha, there you go. I don’t think anyone should put their feet on the seat, but I also wouldn’t alert the police about this.
I can tell why he seemed to leave that bit out of the story. His story is a lot less sympathetic if you frame it as:
“I was sitting on the train and had my feet up on a seat. I refused to take my feet off the seat, so she complained to the conductor. Then ??? and I was getting arrested.”
People with their feet on the seats really bothers me. It’s extra crass if the train was full and he wouldn’t move his feet, but I am not sure if this was a packed car or not. Either way, it’s disrespectful to have your feet on the seat in public transit, and I’d be curious what his exact language was when refusing. Definitely not an arrest-able offense, but this guy sounds like a jerk. I hope we get to see bodycams at one point.
They didn’t call the police, they went to the conductor, who in turn called the police.
Where I live, and you don’t listen to the conductor, they will call the police that specifically handles train security. Not to arrest you but to get you off the train. In most cases it’s to fine the people that get caught without a ticket. If you really misbehave they can legally hold you until the real police arrives.
Yeah, its a different story where we need more context. Racist old lady has blackman arrested, vs entitled idiot was too arrogant to allow others to sit down by placing his feet on open seats. Somewhere in both of those lies the truth.
she meant he should sit at the back
What is your source for this? Even the quote from above says “how” he was sitting, not “where”. Did someone else have better coverage?
It’s a stupid question, I gave it a stupid/nonserious answer. It’s like someone else mentioned a reference.
Yeah, except it fundamentally changes the situation under discussion. Turns out he had his feet on the seat NOT that the woman wanted him to move to the back. Totally different.
ok, my bad
It’s just a reference to racism and Rosa Parks
Err, what?
Sorry I thought you were answering another comment!
So who is the minority now? And what flex does she think that means?
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).
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.
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.
But then how could they arrest you for resisting arrest?
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.
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.
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.
That’d require them to be educated about the law but it seems awfully convenient to keep them ignorant of it.
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.
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.
Not what happened here though. He was taken off the train, released and told to get the next train.
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.
He was refusing to obey the MTA rule of no feet on the seats:
Police responded to a complaint of a 31-year-old “disorderly passenger” on a train at Fordham Metro-North station in the Bronx when “a conductor reported a passenger occupying two seats had refused to remove his feet from one of the seats,” according to authorities.
Everyone’s defending this asshole like crazy. Y’all are mental. Broke ass nation.
Yeah, we’re so broken and mental for being against this kind bullshit police intervention given our recent history of black men being murdered by cops.
Why do I feel like your opinions would be different if these individual’s positions were swapped?
Black MTA workers kick white passangers off trains and call the cops if they’re refusing to obey the rules - literally every day.
If a white guy has his feet on the seats, and an old black man or woman comes and gets the black MTA worker to step in - and the white guy STILL refuses to sit up properly - the MTA worker is put in the position of saying *“okay the rules don’t apply to this one guy, you can refuse the rules, they’re meaningless” * or getting physically involved (which they’re not supposed to do), so the only resort if the passanger is still REFUSING the rules to the MTA worker’s face is to call the cops.
They’re low paid MTA workers, not bouncers at a KKK meeting. This shit goes down regularly this way, it’s just most of the time a “celebrity” isn’t involved. Some drunk asshole is.
Edit: Here’s a white MTA worker dragging a white guy off a train. Beligerent customers are an everyday thing. That’s how the public are. MTA worker punched in the face, after asking someone to get off the train… MTA worker sucker-punched at random.
Everyone’s defending this asshole like crazy.
Maybe because it should’ve been a matter for whatever passes for transport authority or the conductor/inspector and not the police.
Being an asshole isn’t a crime ya know…The conductor was looking the other way, the old lady made the conductor intervene, Okeefe CONTINUED to refuse.
So it was the MTA dealing with it, and Okeefe CONTINUED to refuse. Continued his personal stouch with the lady.
Well, the rules apply to all MTA passangers. MTA trains serve thousands of people each day, the MTA worker wasn’t picking him out. The conductor was leaving him alone until the old lady brought the conductor in, AND OKEEFE CONTINUED TO REFUSE.
So “Racist MTA” doesn’t work as a theory. It doesn’t fit the facts of what happened.
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.
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.
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.
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
People don’t read on Lemmy, yes.
You should know this if you post evidence.
If you EXPLAIN your evidence, and point out specific inconsistentencies with the majority’s beliefs, then that’ll fly further than shutting shit down because you’re pissed.
You want to do this fine, but I’m not here to argue about arguing. You can argue with people your way if you want.
deleted by creator
