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“The reason this is an issue for me is because I don’t want it to happen to anyone else,” said Phillip Martin, a retired investigative reporter.
A Cambridge cafe denied service to a retired GBH investigative reporter last week after an employee mistook him for another Black man who had reportedly wreaked havoc at the coffee shop on another occasion.
Phillip Martin said the debacle began when he met a fellow journalist at the Caffè Nero in Central Square and tried to order a cup of tea. The person behind the counter told him she’d been instructed not to serve him and moved on to the next customer.
“I was aghast,” Martin recalled. “I said, ‘I’m completely confused. Are you mistaking me for someone else?’ And she said, ‘No, it’s you. We have you on video tape.’”
After several minutes of back-and-forth, both called 911.
“It’s something I would do instinctively to try to even out the playing field,” explained Martin, an award-winning reporter who retired earlier this year. “When someone calls the police, it’s best to also have some role in that.”
Cambridge police officers responded to the cafe and spoke separately with Martin and Caffè Nero staff. They ultimately determined the incident was a misunderstanding and cleared Martin to reenter. Although he described the confrontation as “humiliating,” Martin said he went back inside to finish his conversation with Naomi Kooker, a freelance journalist and journalism professor at Regis College.
“I was intent on not being pushed out of the store based on someone’s faulty misidentification,” he explained.
A Caffè Nero spokesperson said the company was “truly sorry for how Mr. Martin was made to feel during his visit” to the coffee shop.
“This was a genuine case of mistaken identity due to the close similarity of height, build, and style of beard and glasses with a customer who had been responsible for significant anti-social behaviour previously,” the spokesperson explained in a statement. “While it is not acceptable to confuse any customer with another, the prior incident was traumatic for the barista involved and it triggered her response.”
According to The Boston Globe, which first reported the incident, the other customer was removed from the store a week prior after he was “abusive to the staff” and relieved himself inside.
Martin returned to Caffè Nero Tuesday afternoon and met with representatives from the corporate team, leading to what he describes as a “very cordial, pleasant conversation.” He accepted their apologies and heard more about the training employees were undergoing in response to the incident.
Paul Morgan, Caffè Nero Americas COO, told Boston.com that training will be extended to all of the company’s stores.
“We also conduct annual anti-discrimination and harassment training for all store team members,” Morgan noted.
While the incident drew strong reactions in Cambridge and beyond, Martin said he’s not calling for a boycott, and he made it clear to Caffè Nero representatives he doesn’t want anyone to lose their job.
“I told them I had no interest whatsoever in anyone being fired over this,” Martin said. “And I mean that sincerely; these are working folk, following what they think is procedure and responding to their own fears.”
Martin said he found the corporate representatives sincere, and he believed them when they said they regretted what happened and were working to correct the error. However, he also said he was left somewhat “befuddled” after he was shown a photo of the person for whom Caffè Nero staff had mistaken him.
“I looked at the photo, and I told them, ‘He looks nothing like me,’” Martin recalled. He said the picture showed a much younger light-skinned Black man with a scruffy beard.
“This was not a doppelgänger in the least,” Martin added.
Martin has reported extensively on the issue of eyewitness misidentification and the disproportionate consequences for Black men. He’s also got some firsthand experience, having been misidentified and forced into a police lineup as a young teenager.
“These things don’t leave your mind,” he noted.
While he feels Caffè Nero acted quickly and sincerely, he hopes the incident will serve as a lesson for other businesses and “turn poison into medicine, if you will.”
“I’m trying to actually put a period to this issue, with Caffè Nero at least, and hope that organizations or people who are responding to this might look at the more broader questions of misidentification that are pervasive throughout our society, that happen in a lot of establishments,” Martin said.
To that end, he flagged last week’s incident to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission.
“The reason this is an issue for me is because I don’t want it to happen to anyone else,” Martin said. “Though, of course, it will — not necessarily at Caffè Nero, but somewhere else.”
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