Dave Britto called for a cab. A driver picked him up — then someone else from Metro Taxi left an irritated voice message laced with the N word.
Now police are investigating the incident.
Click here to listen to the message.
The incident occurred in the late afternoon on Sunday, May 3. Britto (at left in photo) called Metro Taxi from Whalley Pizza. He had locked himself and his wife out of their truck, while the truck was still running.
Leaving his wife to watch the truck, he called Metro Taxi to go home to retrieve the back-up keys. Five minutes after he called, a Metrocab cruised by.
“I asked,” said Britto, “if ‘you’re the one for Whalley Pizza,’ and he said yes. So I slid in.”
That was at 4:14, according to the company’s customer service log.
At 4:28, while he was riding to his West Haven home, Britto said, his phone vibrated. He picked up and retrieved this message: “Yo niggah … you call for a taxi and you have no decency to pick up a phone and cancel the job? Niggah.”
Britto’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Michael Jefferson (on the right in the photo) said that in the era of Obama, there should be zero tolerance for racist verbal assaults on people, even if the perpetrators are careless enough to leave them on a cell phone.
Britto and Jefferson played the recording for the Independent during an interview in Jefferson’s Dixwell Avenue law office.
It appears the cab Britto had gotten into had been nearby and was in fact not the one that was sent in response to the call. When the dispatched car arrived, Britto was gone with the first Metro taxi. There was no fare for the second.
Britto doesn’t know who left the message. The original dispatcher he talked to he described as female. The voice of the epithet-spewing caller appeared to be male.
Whoever made the call, it upset Britto.
“I felt it was disrespectful, demeaning, very degrading,” said Britto. “And he used the word twice.”
“That tells me,” said Jefferson, “that there was an intent here to hurt, to cause injury.”
According to Britto, the West Haven police (Metro Taxi is headquartered in West Haven) said they’d get back to him Tuesday with a report.
“I feel clearly that this could rise to the level of a hate crime,” Jefferson said.
He cited section 53‑A/181, subsections j, k, and l of the state penal code, as possible legal bases to prosecute. “There is certainly intimidation here based on bigotry or bias.”
“There just should be zero tolerance for this kind of thing,” Jefferson said. “We’ve gone through too much for someone to feel comfortable saying this. Racism today is generally subtle. If people feel this way, they should shut up, but not be allowed to convey it on the phone. And say it twice.”
As a past chairman of the state’s African-American Affairs Commission, Jefferson said a year ago he fielded complaints from African-American drivers, some from Metro Taxi, complaining of conditions that made them feel “indentured.” That is, they felt unable to move ahead in the industry given the relationship between drivers and fleet owners.
That eventually led to an announced statewide review of the industry by the General Assembly’s Program Review and Investigations Committee.
That situation, said Jefferson, is entirely separate from the Britto incident, which appears to be an instance of individual racial animus.
Still Jefferson held out the possibility that there may be some liability for the company as well, when the facts come out.
Reached by telephone, Metro Taxi President William Scalzi said he can’t speak to who would have made that call. “We have checked our recordings for that day, gone through them all. I listened to the person who took the call, and it was all OK.”
Having said that, he added, if such an incident occurred and “if it was one of our drivers, even though the drivers are not employees but independent contractors, then that driver would not meet the criteria to be driving a car for Metro Taxi. We would not continue a contractural relationship with a driver who would say anything like that.”
Scalzi went on to say if the call was made by an employee, that person would be terminated.
Scalzi added that there was much at this point that he did not understand about the allegation, based on a reporter’s summary. “First of all, we sent only one cab. Second, the technology we’ve installed is such that it’s highly unlikely any driver would have access to the customer’s phone number.”
He said if a driver comes to a location and the caller/customer is not there, the driver presses a button on his screen and the computer dials the number without the driver becoming aware of it.
While the mystery remains to be worked out by the West Haven police, Scalzi said his company would wait and take whatever action the police directed. “In the absence of that, we wait.”
A call placed to number from which the call to Britto originated led to this taped response: “At the customer’s request, this number does not accept incoming calls.”
“Any decent person should be outraged by this behavior,” Jefferson said, “and the person, when found, fired.”
West Haven Police’s Sgt. Garcia said on Friday that the investigation is ongoing and incomplete.
This is wonderful news. Why? Because if this is the amount of insult that it takes to cause the hiring of a civil rights attorney and press coverage, we have truly progressed from previous generations of authentic racism directed toward Americans "of color" (including many different groups).
Now, here's my question: if this incident is the litmus test for a civil rights action, how are the many young adults in my area that commonly refer to people with lighter skin as "crackers", and that called each other "nigga" in almost every sentence going to handle being dragged to court on these charges?
What happened was rude and bizarre. It does not seem, however, to be a civil rights matter.