Sacramento’s Arden Fair mall enforced a new policy on the day after Christmas in the hopes of preventing large fights.
There were no out-of-control fights at Arden Fair, but the new rule requiring minors to be with parents or guardians upset many shoppers. The policy was posted in fine print on signs inside the mall.
“It just makes me feel like trash, honestly. I work hard. I don’t need to be [discriminated against] because of the way God made me,” one black 16-year-old boy told ABC10 News while waiting to be picked up outside the mall.
He and a number of black parents said they felt the rule was being enforced more frequently for groups of black teenagers, particularly boys.
The Sacramento Police Department, which was helping enforce the private mall’s policy, adamantly denied any racial profiling or bias.
ABC10’s original article on the mall policy and its implementation attracted a lot of attention – and disagreement -- on Facebook.
On Tuesday, Sacramento Police Officer Matt McPhail said the police department’s advance planning and actions on Monday helped prevent large fights from breaking out. In total, he said there were 50 officers staffed at or around the mall.
“My understanding again is that our personnel were applying those standards uniformly. I think a lot of cities would look to us and the result we had in comparison to some of the problems they had at some of their venues as a positive model of how those events can be conducted,” McPhail said.
ABC10 News asked whether the allegations of racial profiling might have been sufficiently put to rest with documentation of who was asked to leave. McPhail said doing so would have been challenging given the huge crowds at the mall and the fact that many teenagers don’t carry forms of identification.
“When you’re talking about as many as 60,000 people, that’s prohibitively difficult and would have an impact on our ability to maintain the safety of the venue,” McPhail said.
Former Arden Fair security chief Steve Reed said that in his tenure at the mall, media were alerted about changes in policy so as to effectively communicate new rules to community members in advance of enforcement.
ABC10 News has reached out to Arden Fair to see whether the mall will change the way it informs potential shoppers when it plans to enforce its “no minors without adult supervision” rule.