Owner of store that called cops on George Floyd condemns police actions #News

The owner of the Minneapolis store where George Floyd allegedly tried to pass a phony $20 bill — triggering a chain of events leading to his police-brutality death — says he won’t call the cops on counterfeiters anymore.

“We are deeply saddened and outraged by what happened to George Floyd in front of our store,” Cup Foods owner Mahmoud Abumayyaleh wrote on Facebook.  “There is no justification for the use of reckless force displayed by the police that murdered George Floyd.”

While “there is a state policy that requires stores to call the police in the case of counterfeit bills” — which Cup Foods followed as “routine practice” — “the incidents that led up to this event teach us all an important lesson about dealing with police,” the Minnesota store owner wrote in the posting Sunday.

“By simply following procedure we are putting our communities in danger. Until the police stop killing innocent people, we will handle incidents like this one using non-violent tactics that do not involve police,” he said.

A store clerk had called the cops on Floyd around 8 p.m. May 25 after the 46-year-old man allegedly tried to pass the counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes.

“The bill was an obvious fake — the ink was still running,” said Angel Stately, a regular Cup customer who said she was later shown the bogus paper money by the worker, to the New York Times. 

Responding police grabbed Floyd outside the shop, and one of them pushed him to the ground and knelt on his neck for nearly 9 minutes, despite his cries that he couldn’t breathe, video shows. Floyd was black, and the officer in the racially charged case is white.