When Maya Santamaria was opening a Minneapolis club in 2003, a city worker handed her a card for a Minneapolis police officer and said, “You’re going to work with this guy.”
To get a business license, a licensing employee told her she had to hire a certain number of off-duty Minneapolis police officers to provide security.
Why?
“Because they’re racist and we’re Mexican,” Santamaria said. “They didn’t want to let Mexicans have nightclubs.”
That’s her conclusion after seeing other similar-sized, white-owned venues escape the same mandate.
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“Be a shame if something happened to your business. Y’know this is a high-crime area, right? Bad things happen all the time to businesses. It’s a real shame…”
sounds just a little bit like a protection racket.
