A San Francisco woman who told HuffPost last week she’d only pretended to call the cops on an 8-year-old black girl she believed to be selling water illegally did, in fact, call the cops, audio released by the San Francisco Police shows.
The roughly 20-second call features Alison Ettel, who’s since earned the nickname ‘Permit Patty,’ speaking to a police dispatcher last Saturday.
When asked to detail the nature of her emergency, Ettel tells the dispatcher, “I have someone who does not have a vendor permit that’s selling water across from the ballpark.”
After the dispatcher transfers her to someone at the police department, however, the line goes dead. It’s unclear if Ettel hung up or if the dispatcher ended the call before the transfer was completed.
Ettel has since publicly apologized for the incident and told HuffPost “this has no racial component to it.” Ettel is white; the girl and her mother, who filmed the encounter, are not.
“I have no problem with enterprising young women,” Ettel said. “I want to support that little girl. It was all the mother and just about being quiet.
“They were screaming about what they were selling,” she explained. “It was literally nonstop. It was every two seconds, ‘Come and buy my water.’ It was continuous and it wasn’t a soft voice, it was screaming.
“I had been putting up with this for hours, and I just snapped.”
The girl’s mother, Erin Austin, told multiple news outlets afterward her daughter was selling water bottles outside the family’s home in a bid to raise money for a trip to Disneyland. Austin told NBC she’d also recently lost her job.
After Austin’s video of Ettel calling the police went viral, Ettel is also out of a job. She resigned as CEO of TreatWell Health, which sells cannabis-infused medical products, saying it was in the best interest of the company.