Featured Image Credit: ABC7 News Bay Area / Nicole Hernandez
Topics: Police, Food and Drink, Viral, Weird, Crime, Travel, California
Gerrard Kaonga
Topics: Police, Food and Drink, Viral, Weird, Crime, Travel, California
A video of a man being arrested for ‘illegally’ eating food while stood on a train platform has gone viral on social media.
That’s right... you read that correctly, arrested for eating a sandwich.
I mean you could be eating some food while on public transport right now while you are reading this, you probably wouldn’t expect to get approached by not one, not two but four police officers to deal with the situation.
Well, the incident happened in San Francisco and the detained man, Steve Foster said he was considering taking legal action after the whole debacle.
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The video, which happened back in November 2019 has recently gone viral on X and other social media platforms again.
It was recorded by his girlfriend, Nicole Hernandez, and shows how BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) authorities confronted Foster.
Admittedly, eating and drinking are not allowed on trains or on the platform. However, BART later apologized to Foster for the interaction between Foster and the identified officer, D. McCormick. Foster did come out and said he did not accept this apology.
"It would have been simpler if he would have come up to me and said hey, you can't eat on BART nor on the platform. I should have been informed because I didn't know I couldn't eat on the platform," expressed Foster.
However, the footage showed that the officer grabbed Foster’s bag and refused to let him leave, before other officers came to the platform to detain him and escort him away.
Hernandez is also heard on the recording questioning why so many officers are dealing with the situation, and argued it was a very minor infraction compared to other people seen taking their bicycles on the escalator, going past the fare gates without paying and drinking alcohol on the platform.
The viral video certainly hasn’t gone down well with just about anyone with many remarking the police were overbearing and unjustified in their behavior for the small issue.
“Police Department should be really ashamed of themselves,” one user wrote on YouTube.
“This is just so ridiculous that I just can’t even justify making a comment so ill just say petty use of resources,” one user wrote.
“Cops are out of f****** control,” another simply commented on X.
“I bet they feel so powerful for arresting a man eating a sandwich,” a fourth person commented.
UNILAD has contacted BART for comment.