White Venture Capitalist Loses Office Lease After Threatening To Call Police On Black Entrepreneurs

Tom Austin was filmed questioning whether the owners of Minneapolis branding agency Top Figure were allowed to use the gym of the Mozaic East building in uptown Minneapolis. The men are tenants of a WeWork in the building.

In the video, Austin is seen taking pictures or filming the entrepreneurs and saying “I’m a tenant of the building, are you?” To which the men respond: “We’re also tenants of this building.” Austin continues to question them anyway.

Austin, managing partner of F2 Group, threatened to call 911 but later called the building manager who told him the men had a lease at the building, owned by the Ackerberg Group.

One of the men later says: “As you can see, we’re dealing with racism here.” The clip was posted to the Top Figure instagram page. The team said in the caption they had been renting the office space for 1 year and a half. 

“We are sick and tired of tolerating this type of behavior on a day to day basis and we feel that we had to bring light onto this situation,” the team said in an Instagram post.

Austin later told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he “should have handled it differently” and that it was “not my job to have done anything.” He claimed he was not being racist.

The incident comes two days after Amy Cooper was filmed calling the police on Christian Cooper, an avid birdwatcher in Central Park, after he asked her to observe the rules and put her dog on a leash.

She was fired from her job at Franklin Templeton after she threateningly told Christian, “I’m going to tell the police an African American man is threatening my life” in yet another instance of a white person calling the police on a black person unnecessarily amid rampant racial profiling and police brutality caught on camera.