A Black real estate investor who sometimes makes work calls from his car wants a white neighbor to quit being so nosy.
Chad Felton was sitting in his vehicle outside his home in an Akron, Ohio, housing complex when he recorded an infuriating exchange.
A woman in a medical mask told him that management at his housing complex planned to call the police because he’d been sitting in his car too long.
File this one under, “oh, hell no.”
‘Where Do You Live?’
The footage kicks off with the woman asking the intrusive, yet all too familiar question: “Where do you live?”
When Felton told the woman to leave, she said the office at the complex had no record of him, and someone was going to alert authorities.
“Hey, the police can be called,” he replied. “Nothing’s wrong here.”
“I just thought I’d give you a heads up,” she said, insisting there was “something suspicious” about him sitting in a car on his phone for hours.
By the video’s account, this was at least the fourth time she’d confronted him, which pokes a pretty big hole in her claim that she didn’t know him.
Her façade fully cracked when Felton pulled out his house keys. She quickly pivoted, “Sir, you know what. Whether you live here or not, Melissa [in the office] told me…”
‘Mind Your Business’
One commenter on the video wasn’t having it: “‘Whether you live here or not’…class act. Gotta get yourself some business cards that say, ‘Mind your own business, Karen.’”
Felton posted the video to Instagram in early August, and it’s just one more entry in a long, exhausting list of Black people getting harassed or threatened with the law for the “crime” of working and living their lives.
Earlier in August, police illegally detained two young Black men on their way to work because they believed the men matched a suspect description.
In July, a white Maryland woman called the cops on two Black teenage girls for having a picnic while visiting a friend in a housing community.
Back in May, a New York store owner made a false complaint to police about a Black service processor. Footage from the processor’s Meta glasses revealed the shop owner as the actual aggressor, axe in hand, and likely kept the processor from being arrested.
In all these cases, video lets the public see interactions that would otherwise go unseen.
That may explain why the woman in this video didn’t just ask Felton to stop recording once. She repeated the demand multiple times, even falsely claiming it was illegal to record in public. Whatever her reasoning, she clearly didn’t want this exchange going anywhere.
