Yema Khalif feared for his life.
It was late one August night and Khalif was at his eponymous clothing store, Yema — the only Black-owned shop in Tiburon — with his wife, Hawi Awash, and a friend. They were putting clothes onto the racks and processing other inventory that had arrived a few days earlier. He noticed a police car circling his block, slowing down by his store, and then making more rounds.
Khalif, an American who emigrated from Kenya as a student almost a decade ago, was nervous. This would not be the first time he had been profiled by police, he said, and he braced for an interaction that was a few minutes away.
A patrol officer had seen people in the store at 1 a.m. and questioned why they were there. Bodycam footage captures the tense exchange.
“Hi guys, I’ve never seen you open this late, you just restocking?” the officer asks.
“No, we’re just doing our thing,” Khalif says.
“What’s your thing?” the officer asks.
“Is there a problem?” Khalif asks.
The officer keeps asking why they’re at the store this late, at one point asking Khalif to take his hands out of his pocket. Khalif repeats that if there isn’t a problem, he didn’t need to identify himself and asked that they be left alone.
“What’s the problem with three people being in a store?” Khalif asks.
“Because it’s 1 o’clock in the morning,” the officer who identifies himself as Isaac says.
“So what stands out to you is that there’s three Black people in the store?” Khalif says.
The officer’s supervisor, Sgt. Michael Blasi, and another officer arrive at the scene five minutes in. Khalif insists that if he isn’t doing anything suspicious, he doesn’t need to answer anyone.
Simply being in a well-lit store wasn’t a crime, and the fact the alarms weren’t blaring was also an indicator they belonged there, Khalif told The Chronicle.
On the recording, he keeps asking why the police officers were interrogating him, and the officers keep asking him to identify himself.
“Is it your store? That’s all we want to know,” Blasi says.
“If I tell you it’s my store, then what?” Khalif asks.
“Then show me that it’s your store,” Blasi says. “Can you prove that it’s your store?”
This is one of the numerous moments in the video that many Black Americans, and experts on race relations, say exemplifies the experience of Black people across the country.
“This case illustrates how fraught relations are between communities of color and the police,” said Jack Glaser, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Policy who researches racial disparities in law enforcement.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the police checking in on a store that has people in it at 1 a.m. in a quiet town like Tiburon, Glaser said. But the people in the store have seen that police officers are inordinately suspicious of Black people, overly monitor them and use more physical force against them. So the store owners’ concerns are justified, he said.
The wealthy, serene community of Tiburon, with a population of 9,000 people, is 90% white. It’s what Nikki Jones, a professor of African American studies at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on race and policing, calls a quintessentially white space. The consequence of being in an environment like that if you’re Black is that you stand out. You’re hyper-visible and the assumption is that you don’t belong, she said.
“That’s what Yema was attuned to. That the officers saw three Black people in the store who maybe should not be there. Perhaps these were not the store owners, but if they were, then they had to prove it,” Jones said.
It took a white neighbor who lived a few doors down to yell, “It’s his store!” for the officers to leave, the video shows.
Awash, who co-owns the store, said she was shaking the entire time. Their friend was recording the exchange. Awash said she has been profiled before and pulled over when she’s driving around Tiburon, and the interaction with the police that night was like reliving trauma over and over again. The indignity Khalif experienced when a neighbor’s word was taken over his was particularly grating, she said.
“How do you not know the only Black shop owners in town?” Awash said. “We’re pretty well-known around here, and for the police officers to not know about us says a lot about them.” The Tiburon Chamber of Commerce named the Yema store Business of the Month in May.
Tiburon police declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation into whether the officers violated policies or procedures.
Awash and Khalif met as students at Dominican University. Khalif grew up in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Awash was born in Ethiopia and moved with her family as refugees to Kenya before landing in Minnesota at the age of 8. They started their company online in 2016, and opened their first physical store in February of this year — just in time for shelter-in-place orders a month later. The store specializes in selling African print clothing, and it has since reopened, building a strong clientele.
The recording from inside the store was shared on social media and gained prominence after Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp organization shared it. Golden State Warriors player Klay Thompson posted on his Instagram saying, “Black people always have to prove their innocence no matter how successful they are. This s—’s exhausting.”
Jones said the store owners are not overreacting. And what may seem innocuous to some people are encounters that could turn deadly very quickly for Black people.
“George Floyd died over a $20 bill,” she said.
In a year marked by the killings of Black people at the hands of law enforcement, leading to protests nationwide calling for police reform, the conduct of the Tiburon officers is particularly tone-deaf, Jones said. All of this could have been avoided if the officers knew the owners of the only Black-owned shop in a town that’s 90% white, she said.
“That’s the core issue. Why does Tiburon have those demographics in a place as diverse as the Bay Area? We need to look at decades of segregation, housing and education policies to truly explain why that night happened,” Jones said.
The incident has rattled Tiburon and the neighboring town of Belvedere. The two local councils held a special meeting a week after the incident to discuss what happened and to hear from Khalif and Awash, and the community. The one-hour meeting turned into four hours, with impassioned perspectives during the public comments portion.
Richard Fink, a longtime resident of Belvedere, said at the meeting that the need for community policing, in which law enforcement officers knew shop owners and people who live in the town, was paramount. Teveia Barnes, a Tiburon resident, said Black people daring to leave their homes only to risk ending up as a tragedy was disturbing. Logan Grime called to say that Blasi was one of the deputies involved in a wrongful death lawsuit involving his father, Cary Grime, who was arrested in Novato in 2003 after a struggle and died a few days later, according to court documents. The lawsuit was later settled.
Blasi resigned from his post on Sept. 1. A week later, Tiburon’s police chief, Michael Cronin, opted for early retirement amid the community backlash. The town has hired an independent attorney to investigate the incident. There have been three meetings about the incident so far and a move to create a diversity task force. Not everyone agreed on the function of the committee.
Tiburon Mayor Alice Fredericks favors an advisory capacity for the task force, but Vice Mayor Holli Thier prefers an oversight committee with powers to launch investigations into police misconduct and for the committee to be involved in hiring and firing decisions of the police. But she didn’t have the votes for it and praised her colleagues for at least moving to create the advisory task force. A draft resolution on the creation of the task force will be presented at the next meeting on Oct. 7.
Khalif, for his part, would like to envision a neighborhood, a world, where he doesn’t have to prove his existence.
“I’ve been profiled before. Once when I went to pick up mail on Main Street and numerous times when I’ve been walking by my home in Tiburon,” he said. “I just wish the amount of heart I put into this community was a two-way street.”
Shwanika Narayan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @shwanika Instagram: @shwanika
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Tiburon police face probe over tense exchange at town’s only Black-owned shop - San Francisco Chronicle
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