It started with a computer student trying to cash a money order, a transaction that would have required a $50 fee, courtesy of the blood-sucking check-cashing industry.
Instead, he saved the 50 bucks but ended up in handcuffs.
The misunderstanding gained notoriety last week when the young man's mentor, Rodney Sampson, broadcast what happened in a series of Tweets — that is, after he rushed to the downtown business to save his student from a stint in jail.
“A day in the life of a black engineering coding student,” was what Sampson called it.
“In this, we saw saw the inequities of civil, human and economic rights converge here and all get violated at the same time,” Sampson told me. He’s an exec with TechSquare Labs, a techie hub near Georgia Tech.
On Tuesday afternoon a 19-year-old named Joshua went to Atlanta Check Cashers near the Five Points MARTA Station to cash a $500 postal service money order. The money was a stipend for living expenses as he started an intense and innovative pilot program that teaches computer-coding skills to low-income young people.
The idea, sponsored by the city’s Workforce Development Agency and TechSquare Labs, is based on the old “if you teach a man to fish” proverb, although these days being literate in Java programming has more economic upside than fishing.
Joshua is a baby-faced fellow who wants to improve his life and not be publicly identified. He belongs to the universe of poor folk known as the “unbanked,” so he took his money order to the check cashing place out of habit. I’m told some students tried to cash their money orders at a nearby post office — where it would have cost nothing — but there wasn’t enough cash on hand.
Instead, Atlanta Check Cashers charges 10 percent and serves people with few other options.
A visit Friday morning to the Forsyth Street business found them lined up 15 deep. A woman shouted at the clerk behind the bullet-proof glass. A baby screamed in a stroller. And the others endured the wait with grim-faced stoicism. The business manager didn’t want to talk and told me to scram.
Three days earlier, on Tuesday, the clerk behind the glass thought Joshua was trying to slip a counterfeit money order past her, so she confiscated it and his state-issued ID.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Tell it to the cops,” she told him. He called APD. They arrived and promptly put him in cuffs.
Sampson was called about the situation, Ubered downtown and found his student in the back of the squad-car. After some 30 minutes of detention, and after Sampson proved the money order was legit, the cops unshackled young Josh, who was still seething, embarrassed but not necessarily surprised.
“He was livid. I was livid. I literally wanted to break down crying on the spot,” Sampson wrote online. “It took everything in me to stand tall & resolute.”
Joshua contended an officer scrolled through his cell phone and taunted him, apparently trying to goad him into getting himself in some real trouble. Major Scott Kreher, the zone commander, said cuffing the teen follows procedure, but APD is investigating the cop for the alleged cell phone snooping and rude behavior.
The next day, Kreher visited TechSquare Labs to talk to Joshua and his 16 classmates.
“I praised the student for remaining very calm and not escalating the situation,” Kreher said. “It’s important to have these conversations about perceptions people have about police Some are right, some are wrong.”
Sampson, who like the detainee is black, said the episode was a case of “institutional racism,” even though the cashier was black, as was the cop.
Perhaps, although things sometimes do get a bit complicated.
Kreher said there may have been bias involved, but “the bias wasn’t race.”
Sampson said the incident occurred on the second day of a 13-month class that teaches the basics of Java coding, a bedrock skill that should help students enter the blooming field.
“We’re tying to break the cycle,” he said, “the prison pipeline.”
Sampson told Joshua and the other recruits that their retaliation is to grind through the program and succeed.
It’s a thought lost on many others where they come from. Too many.
On Thursday night, I visited TechSquare Labs to meet Sampson and Joshua. There was a forum sponsored by the ride-sharing company Uber, which had sent a few techies to town to search for new recruits, especially minority candidates.
The Uber crew, in their black company T-shirts and skinny jeans, held court in front of perhaps 150 college students and tech enthusiasts, including aspiring inner-city Java students.
After the session, Joshua walked out chatting with his new classmates. What was he thinking about? I asked.
He smiled. “Opportunity,” he said.
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