Another white woman went viral after she called the police on a Black person for a minor dispute.
Janae Garcia was sitting in a park in the Upper West Side of New York City on May 29 when she was approached by pregnant restaurateur Svitlana Flom, beginning a prolonged encounter that led to Flom calling the police on Garcia some three times. Garcia recorded their interaction and posted video of it on her Instagram page on May 30.
Garcia claims Flom, who is characterized as a “socialite” by Page Six, “felt the need to not only approach me but call the cops MULTIPLE TIMES ON ME!!”
“She was too ‘Alarmed’ that I was sitting ‘comfortably’ in “her neighborhood!” Garcia wrote in her Instagram post accompanying the video.
The series of 10 video clips shows Flom, who apparently was accompanied by two of her children, talking on the phone and arguing with Garcia. At one point,a man Garcia identified as Flom’s husband walks by but doesn’t engage with either woman.
“She’s filming me, she’s calling me a b—h,” Flom told a dispatcher. “She came to me and my kids threatening me.”
“‘This is my building, this is my neighborhood,” Garcia said before she panned the camera to show a skyscraper. “I’m sitting here by myself trying to enjoy my time by myself and this white woman is making me very uncomfortable.”
At one point in the video Flom accused her adversary of “playing the Black card.”
The last video showed Flom walking away. Before she left, Flom asked Garcia to walk with her to speak to the police.
“Can you imagine that,” Garcia replied with a snicker. “Me walk with you to the police. Can you imagine that? If bozo was a person, it would be you.”
Garcia’s video comes a week after similar incident in Central Park. Amy Cooper, another white woman, called the police after Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, asked her to put a leash on her cocker spaniel. Amy Cooper lost her job and dog after a video filmed by Christian Cooper went viral.
The video went viral and Flom was panned on social media for her behavior. The Yelp page for her restaurant has been inundated with negative reviews since the video.
“Why would I even step foot in a restaurant that would most likely call the cops on me for no reason at all,” wrote a Yelp reviewer. “I can imagine the experience it would be like. Oh yeah, that Racist video went viral, I know what I saw. She’s one of those entitled Euro Karens.”
“Another day… another Karen using her privilege to call the police on an unarmed African American woman minding her business getting fresh air in the park,” tweeted one viewer.
“You can’t even just enjoy the sun peacefully as a black person in 2020, Without someone coming to [harass] you! Unacceptable [behavior by] this pregnant white woman who left her children alone to go [harass] an innocent black lady,” wrote another.
In an interview this week with Page Six, Flom accused Garcia of editing the video to cast her in a negative light. She claims Garcia recorded 45 minutes of footage and wants her to share an unedited version.
“She put her narrative on it to make me look like a racist,” she told the outlet. “She twisted the entire thing like she’s some poor girl sitting alone on a bench and I’m white trash, harassing her for no reason.
Flom claims she approached Garcia and another person because she wanted to inform them “they’re not supposed to be smoking [weed] and [Garcia], jumped off [her seat], ran in my face. She didn’t care I was pregnant, or that I had two little kids.”
The police eventually spoke with both women at the scene. There were no arrests or citations issued.
