Do stores really still chase and detain shoplifters?

After that initial round of protests, Oberlin caved to student demands to cancel all its business with the bakery. Later, an Oberlin Police Department investigation, undertaken to probe accusations of racist behavior at the bakery, found that among 40 adults arrested for shoplifting at the business in a five-year period, six were black, suggesting vigilant enforcement against people of all races.

The lawsuit goes on to allege that when David Gibson sat down with administrators to tell them about the devastating effect that defamation, boycotts, demonstrations, and refusal to do business with Gibson’s were having on his family’s store, Oberlin administrators sought to negotiate special treatment for shoplifting students in exchange for resuming relations with the bakery.

The complaint described the meeting as follows:

Gibson requested that Oberlin College immediately retract the defamatory statements and reinstate its contracts … Defendants represented that they would consider reinstating business … but only if Gibson’s Bakery would agree that “Gibson’s would not push criminal charges against first-time shoplifters” … Gibson’s Bakery already loses thousands of dollars a year due to stolen merchandise, and such losses would certainly multiply if students learned they could steal without repercussion.

Time would only further undermine the proposition that the Oberlin students were innocents victimized by a racist local business. While pleading guilty to misdemeanor theft charges in August 2017, each of the students would declare in an official statement, “I believe the employees of Gibson’s actions were not racially motivated. They were merely trying to prevent an underage sale.”

And yet, the Gibsons’ lawsuit alleged, Oberlin students giving campus tours on behalf of the college advised prospective and future students and their families not to shop at Gibson’s Bakery because it was “racist” and “assaults students.” Various hits to the business ultimately caused it to lay off multiple employees, adding to the social injustice done by the misguided student activists and the Oberlin faculty and administrators who abetted their harmful efforts.

That is not to say that everyone at Oberlin was of like mind.

Almost a year after the incident, Roger Copeland, a professor emeritus of theater and dance, wrote a letter to the student newspaper lamenting, “It is now abundantly clear that the College’s boycott of Gibson’s was disingenuous and utterly unwarranted.” He criticized then–Oberlin President Marvin Krislov and Raimondo for a “rush to judgment” and actions that amounted “to a staggering, potentially bankrupting loss” to a small family business, and concluded with this biting critique:

The facts of this case are no longer in question. And yet, a counter-narrative has taken hold, one that refuses to allow mere “facts” to get in the way. It’s embarrassing when one has to ask Oberlin students the same question one asks climate-change deniers: At what point do you accept the empirical evidence, even if that means having to embrace an “inconvenient” truth? Alas, even those who concede that the defendants violated the law, continue—stubbornly—to insist that there is “plenty of blame to go around” and that “both sides” are at fault. Really? Isn’t that what Donald Trump said about Charlottesville?

The time has come for the Dean of Students, on behalf of the College, to apologize to the Gibson family for damaging not only their livelihood but something more precious and difficult to restore—their reputation and good standing in the community.

At trial, Raimondo [Dean of Students] was revealed to have sent a text reacting to Copeland’s letter that said, “Fuck him. I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.” To me, the metaphor suggests administrators who calculatingly wield some control over whether students activists are aggressive or restrained.

While pleading guilty to misdemeanor theft charges in August 2017, each of the students would declare in an official statement, “I believe the employees of Gibson’s actions were not racially motivated. They were merely trying to prevent an underage sale.”

I think they should just get rid of owners