On Sunday, the conservative internet was abuzz with a report of Black Lives Matter protesters attacking innocent people. Dr. Andrea Natale, a cardiologist at the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute, tweeted that his daughter had been attacked. The tweet, which has since been pulled down, read: “My daughter called in tears. She was driving w her boyfriend in Baltimore & their car was attacked by a group of BLM. It was damaged & her BF was beaten. She filmed it & called the police but they cannot do anything bc they are African American. Is this the America we want?”
As anti-Black Lives Matter internet spheres began sharing this tale of Black protesters randomly attacking white people in downtown Baltimore, other online sleuths were able to suss out a more complete story. First, a Twitter account called @scanthepolice which follows the police scanner posted a thread that started with this interesting tidbit of information: “A group of BLM”? You mean protesters? There wasn’t a protest yesterday. We were on the scanner & heard nothing of the sort of incident you mean, fwiw. We heard of adults trying to fight squeegee kids, if that’s what you mean?”
Then there was only one dispatcher call that resembled the one Dr. Andrea Natale spoke of, found by the @suchaputz Twitter account of Jasen, who archives police radio broadcasts in Baltimore. The dispatch call did not match up to the Texas doctor’s story. At all.
The doctor’s account was very quickly deleted after the blowback he received. And subsequently, The Baltimore Sun published video of police responding to Natale’s daughter’s call. The video shows a couple giving an account of a fight they had with some of the “squeegee kids” in the area. The woman is audibly shaken up and the man in the video has to repeatedly try to slow down her recollection of events.
The long and short of the incident is that the kids will tap on a person’s driver’s side mirror with their squeegees as people slowly pass by them. It’s a possible microaggression the kids perform when they’ve been either waved off, or more specifically completely ignored by drivers. According to the couple, the woman who was driving stopped her car to chastise the teen for tapping her mirror, at which point an argument ensued and her boyfriend got out of the car to confront a group of kids. It is at this point that, by the boyfriend’s own admission, he told the group of kids that he “will defend” himself and that he had a knife in his possession. The boyfriend then tells the officer that one kid may have pulled out his own knife. No one touched one another, but one of the kids may have hit their car with something.
There seems to be a scratch on the driver’s side door and possibly a chipped mirror. If we are to believe the couple, these hits to the car came as the incident escalated and were not caused by the teen who tapped her mirror in the first place. One of the most telling moments in the video is when the couple says they can give their report to the officer, and the woman points across to the park running parallel to the road they are on, saying she believes some of the people might have witnessed the events. “They were here as well, they witnessed the whole thing but I don’t think that they’re gonna say anything against their kind.”
Their kind. There have been lots of incidents reported between the kids and drivers. The officer, giving the couple their report receipt, tells them that the city doesn’t want officers to “engage with squeegee boys” that much. One note: When the police officer is filling out the report on the hood of his car, there are two other officers. One of the officers says “same old same old,” and another remarks that one of the kids who seems to have been filmed and identified to some degree could do a short stint in a “juvie hall,”* as a “time-out.” Maryland is the state taking money out of education to build children’s prisons, prisons that turn kids into lifelong prisoners.
St. David’s Medical Center released a statement from Natale that says, “I was worried about my daughter, and I jumped to conclusion based on the information I had at the time. I’ve dedicated my entire professional career to healing people from all backgrounds, and I regret that my words were misinterpreted and created hurt and pain. It was not my intention.”
There was nothing misinterpreted here. The only “words” that were accurate in his entire tweet were “Baltimore,” “daughter,” and maybe “BF.” The whole group of “BLM,” the general thrust of the post, and the concept that the police refused to follow up on the incident because of the kids’ race are all 100% erroneous statements. The conclusion he “jumped to,” was super-duper extra racist with a generous sprinkling of political right-wing racial baiting on top.
One of the most important takeaways from this story is a reminder that children, like the teen seen in the above photo, have been trying to make extra money since well before the pandemic hit our shores by standing in downtown city traffic trying to wash people’s windows. They do this because the United States is one of the richest economies in the world.
*Juvenile detention center