The company released the following statement Saturday:
"We apologize to the two individuals and our customers and are disappointed this led to an arrest. We take these matters seriously and clearly have more work to do when it comes to how we handle incidents in our stores. We are reviewing our policies and will continue to engage with the community and the police department to try to ensure these types of situations never happen in any of our stores."
Video of that arrest, which took place on Thursday, was posted to Twitter. It now has more than 2 million views and has prompted an internal investigation within the Philadelphia Police Department.
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The caption of the video reads: "The police were called because these men hadn't ordered anything. They were waiting for a friend to show up, who did as they were taken out in handcuffs for doing nothing. All the other white ppl are wondering why it's never happened to us when we do the same thing."
In the video you can hear the friend who was meeting them ask officers what's going on.
"What did they get called for?" he asked. "Because there are two black guys sitting here meeting me? Tell me, what did they do?"
Other customers then chimed in.
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"They didn't do anything, I saw the entire thing," a person off-camera said.
Starbucks responded to the tweet, saying "we're reviewing the incident with our partners, law enforcement and customers to determine what took place and led to this unfortunate result."
Philadelphia police also tweeted that they are aware of the incident at the location at Spruce and South 18th streets and they are conducting an internal investigation.
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According to the DA's office, charges were declined due to a lack of evidence and the men were released from police custody early Saturday morning.
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