As the nation anxiously awaits the results of the 2020 presidential race, police in Tiburon, Calif. are investigating a social media post threatening to destroy the city's only Black-owned store after the election.
The Mercury News reports an Instagram user threatened to destroy a clothing shop named Yema.
“If Biden wins me and the boys gonna go raid yemma,” the unidentified person wrote on the social media platform. “4:00 on Election Day show up.”
The post, which included a photo of the store, has now been deactivated. Owners Hawi Awash and Yema Khalif, two immigrants from Ethiopia and Kenya, heard about the post from parents of students at Del Mar Middle School. The couple said the parents learned about the threat from their child, who follows the Instagram account.
“Where we come from, we are not allowed to make those jokes,” Khalif told The Mercury News. “We take it as a full threat and that’s how we look at it.”
Town Manager Greg Chanis said officers are investigating, but it's not clear if a Del Mar student wrote the post.
“Given the day today and everything else going on, we will take it as a serious threat,” Chanis said. “We will react accordingly.”
Nancy Lynch, the superintendent of the Reed Union School District, and Brian Lynch, the principal of Del Mar Middle School, delivered a joint statement and said the post may have come from a “fictitious account.”
“We have no information to indicate any risks to the safety or well being of any RUSD students,” the administrators said. “At this point in our investigation, we know these posts on Instagram were not made on a district-issued device nor made during school hours.”
Khalif applauded the person who notified them about the threat.
"If the community turns a blind eye to this hateful rhetoric it’ll take root,” the Kenyan native said. “Right now the person who reached out to make us aware allowed us to put out a warning, otherwise we would not have known and we would have been blindsided by the whole thing.”
According to NPR, cities and businesses nationwide have been preparing for unrest after the 2020 election. High-end retailers, as well as mom and pop shops in cities such as Chicago, are boarding up their stores to protect their property.
"We all know that emotions will be high because they already are and I urge you to channel those emotions into peaceful and productive expressions," Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said, NPR reported.
Business owners are especially worried about their stores as they are already struggling to survive the devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the damage many of them suffered amid uprisings during the summer.
"Coming off of the summer, seeing the looting that occurred, there's a lot of anxiety," Elliot Richardson, director of the Small Business Advocacy Council in Chicago said. "There's a lot of nervousness about what might happen now, what might happen during the election."
Khalif and Awash sparked another investigation in August when they accused police of of profiling them, KTVU reported. The owners said they had a confrontation with police around 1 a.m. when they returned to their store after-hours to finish some work on inventory.
As they continued with their work, the couple said they noticed an officer circling the block repeatedly and watching them from across the street, looking through the glass front of the store, which had all lights on.
Khalif and Awash said the officer called a supervisor before approaching them, then questioned their presence in the store.
"This street closes at 9 o'clock at night, and this isn't regular business hours, there's no customers in there. Is this your store? That's all we want to know," the supervisor said, according to the owners.
The couple was touched by the community's support following that incident.
"We've gotten support and love and people speaking up to say this is not right, this is wrong," Awash said. "Working while black is not a crime, and many people are standing with us, and that's the conversation we need to have, let's change the perspective."
