A TikTok video that drew millions of views showed an elderly woman threatening to call the cops on her Black neighbor just for turning her A/C on.
The video was captured by a doorbell camera on the Black woman’s home and posted on the TikTok account @camera.street8 last month.
The clip starts with a view of a white woman waiting at her neighbor’s front door.
“Hi, how are you?” the Black woman says through the camera’s intercom.
“Yeah, I need to talk to you,” the neighbor answered.
After the Black woman said she wasn’t at home, the neighbor threatened to call 911.
“Well then I’m gonna have to call the police to come over here because you were told not to put your air conditioner on and your air conditioner’s running and it’s going in the unit downstairs,” the neighbor states.
Doorbell camera equipment can feature capabilities that allow a homeowner to view home surveillance video on an app and speak to visitors from a remote location.
The Black woman clarified to the lady that the A/C shouldn’t be on and that she spoke with her landlord about the matter.
The neighbor leans into the camera as she appears to have trouble hearing through the camera. She remains persistent and challenges the Black woman’s claim by saying the A/C is on, suggesting it could be running on an automatic setting.
The Black woman finally settles the dispute by stating she will come home to shut off the unit.
‘How soon can you be here?” the elderly neighbor asks without missing a beat. “In 30 minutes,” she responds.
The two women end things politely with the neighbor saying “Thank you, we’ll see you then.”
The TikTok video showing the encounter garnered nearly four million views and thousands of comments since its posting. It’s overlaid with the text, “What Being a Black women living in a retired neighborhood looks like…calling the police on me for having my AC on.”
It’s unclear what occurred after the Black woman arrived home to attend to the A/C. The viral video garnered over 8,000 comments mostly in support of the Black woman.
“How dare you stay cool in the summer! The nerve!” one commenter sarcastically wrote.
“Nobody is gonna tell me when I can turn my ac on and off,” another person wrote.
“That sounds like a maintenance problem if the tenant said that it isn’t on,” one comment read.
