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Two Florida Women Accuse Walgreens of Racial Profiling After Being Forced Back Into Store Over Shoplifting Claims

A shopper and her friend walked into Walgreens Tuesday evening to pick up some items and immediately experienced racial profiling.

Crystal Davis and Santanta Neal said they headed to the drug store off Miramar to buy a few beauty supplies and noticed an employee following them around.

“As soon as we walked in the store, we kept hearing the alerts, ‘Security check the floor,” Davis told Abc News 10.

The two said right after they left the store, they were bum-rushed by authorities who accused them of stealing.

“‘How?” Davis said she told security. “’Here’s our bags. Here’s our receipt.'”

The woman posted a video of a Miramar officer going through she and Neal’s purses on Instagram and wrote, “Just being racially profiled at Walgreens.”

The police didn’t find any stolen products in the women’s’ bags and were escorted out of the store. Davis said despite the Walgreens manager being Black, she still feels like it was a “profiling situation.”

“Your race doesn’t mean anything,” Davis expressed. “I can racially profile against another Black person. You can be racially profiled against your own kind. We weren’t the only ones in the store, but we were being followed. We were harassed and they had no proof of anything.”

Miramar Police Department agreed that Neal and Davis voluntarily allowed the cops to search their bag and Walgreens said they’ve communicated with the two women.

“First and foremost, we firmly believe everyone should be welcome and treated with respect at our stores, and we’ll continue working to make sure that happens,” a Walgreens spokesperson stated on Thursday. “Our policies strictly prohibit any form of discrimination or racial profiling, and any such occurrence will not be tolerated. We’ve been in contact with our customer. We take this matter very seriously and are sorry it happened. We continue to investigate this issue so we can learn how this happened and to prevent similar incidents in the future.”

Davis told the news source she refuses to shop at the store again.

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