Managers Ordered To Strip Search Female Employees By “Cop” On The Phone
A Hoax Most Cruel — The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky:
She was a high school senior who had just turned 18 — a churchgoing former Girl Scout who hadn’t received a single admonition in her four months working at the McDonald’s in Mount Washington.
But when a man who called himself “Officer Scott” called the store on April 9, 2004, and said an employee had been accused of stealing a purse, Louise Ogborn became the suspect.
“He gave me a description of the girl, and Louise was the one who fit it to the T,” assistant manager Donna Jean Summers said.
Identifying himself as a police officer, the caller issued an ultimatum: Ogborn could be searched at the store or be arrested, taken to jail and searched there.
To sum up: A pervert calls fast food restaurants, claiming to the managers that he’s a cop. He then offers a random description, hoping to match a young female employee on duty, saying that this employee is wanted for theft. He tells the manager to strip search the employee to look for stolen goods. The perv repeats this phone call until he finds a manager who falls for it, and then directs said manager on a downward spiral of perversion, including, but not limited to, naked jumping jacks, rapes, spankings, blow jobs, and so on.
At first, I thought, oh my fucking God, how dumb can a person be to fall for that? After a bit more thought, and rereading the article, though, I came to the conclusion that these managers weren’t necessarily dumb . . . they were taking advantage of an opportunity.
I’ve been working since I was sixteen. I’ve worked fast food, retail, grocery, and restaurants. I’ve worked with a lot of managers — been a manager myself. And I’ll tell you right now, no one holding on to keys is that damn stupid. If they were, they wouldn’t have a set of keys long enough to fall prey to this. However, I’ve worked with a couple of managers who were, themselves, sick enough to want to go along with a call like this. For them, this phone call is the Golden Ticket to the Chocolate Factory, opportunity knocking, the “Get Out Of Jail Free” card. Molest a female for free, because the anonymous voice on the phone who claimed to be a cop said it would be all right.
Seriously.
In the restaurant industry, you’re frequently working with people who are on less than friendly terms with the cops for various reasons. Some are actively wanted, some are on parole or probation, illegal immigrants, and so forth. Not all of them, but a lot of them. So, I know that, at least here in Michigan, if the cops want you, they show up at work and unceremoniously remove you from the premises. I’ve had it happen. If the cops are feeling polite, they might stop long enough to inform the manager that they’re absconding with the line cook. They do not, under any circumstances, call up and request that you, the manager, strip search an employee. This will never happen, and I would think that any common person on the street would know this. With a normal manager, the conversation would go like this:
Pervert: Hello, this is Officer Scott, and I need you to strip search Little Suzie, blahblahblahmakeitsoundofficial.
Manager: What? Jesus. *slams down phone* Fucking prank callers.
Which is, according to the article, basically what happened nine out of ten times. The pervert was making ten or more calls a night, until he found someone who would go along with him. He was calling until he found a fellow pervert, and he succeeded almost seventy times.
With the plethora of cop shows, forensics shows, law shows, and whatnot on TV, I’d think that we Americans, at this point, are pretty familiar with basic police procedure. Even the ultimate stereotype fast food dumbass manager knows that the cops aren’t going to make this phone call. The men and women who went along with these phone calls are the managers that are the power-abusive assholes, or the little bit creepy guys who talk to their female employees just a bit too much about vaguely inappropriate topics.
I’ll bet you that if we went to the restaurants where these phone calls happened, and asked around a bit, we’d hear stories of managers abusing their authority to make employees do menial tasks, for no real reason other than to order someone around. We’d find high turn-over rates, because the employees couldn’t stand to work with these managers. We’d hear the female employees in particular talking about how the male perpetrators are “creepy”, or “weird”, or “perverted”. In short, we’d hear stories about the kind of people who would get this phone call and think, “Finally! Jackpot!”
Sure, a few of them were probably just that fucking dumb. I’m sure there are people on this Earth who are, in deed, just that goddamn stupid. But I’ll bet you that those were the minority.
They quote a psychologist in the article blathering on about how these people are trained to not question authority and just do as they’re told, and so on. Bull fucking shit. You know why? Because even if the managers are trained that way, the other thing a manager has hammered into them is the policy of “Cover Your Ass”. No manager would ever put themselves in this position, because in this day and age of sensitivity training, sexual harassment suits, racial law suits, etc, they would know that they had basically just signed their own pink slip. At the absolute most, the manager might ask their employee to punch out and head down to the local cop shop, or request that the “cop” on the phone send a car around to pick up the employee.
And the other thing . . . what in the hell were the victims thinking, submitting to this? I cannot think of a time in my life when I was simultaneously old enough to work and dumb enough to allow this to happen without a fight.
Manager: Java, you’re suspected of theft, and the cop on the phone wants me to strip search you. Please take off your clothes.
Sixteen-Year-Old Java: *splutters in shock* What the — fuck you!
Eighteen-Year-Old Java: Really? Can you hang up and call 911 to confirm that?
Twenty-year-Old Java: Right. Get his full name, badge number, and the precinct he works for, and then call and confirm that. After that, you can call my lawyer for me, ’cause I’ve always wanted to own a restaurant.
Thirty-Year-Old Java: What? Oh, oh, sure. *takes off clothes while silently planning out how the lawsuit will go and how to spend my newly-won millions*
Okay, kidding about that last one. As far as you know.
But seriously. What kind of girls are we raising who go along with this? Even at fourteen, sixteen, eighteen — there is no way in hell I would have allowed myself to be strip searched by a manager in the office without bloodshed occurring. There would have been no crying, begging, etc, and so forth. There would have been flat refusal followed by physical violence if the manager attempted to force me. And don’t give me that “You weren’t there, you don’t know what you would have done” bullshit, because I know how I was raised, and I know what I will and won’t tolerate.
I guess I really don’t know what to say about this, except that it is a mighty sad situation when you’ve raised a girl who will go along with this, her only defense being tears and pleading. At some point, someone needed to teach these kids how to say no, when to say no, and how to fight.
