ST. PETERSBURG — She didn't mean to, but inside Starbucks with her headphones on, Amanda Adams got comfortable and fell asleep. Two police officers woke her and escorted her outside.
"It was humiliating," the 34-year-old said. "I didn't realize I fell asleep. To be woke up like that, it's just embarrassing."
As a homeless woman, she knows that sleeping in Starbucks could get her charged with trespassing.
What Adams doesn't know is that employees of that Starbucks, at 199 First Ave. N in downtown St. Petersburg, have called police to remove homeless people more often than most stores in the Tampa Bay area.
The Seattle-based coffee company faced days of protests after a store manager called police on two black men who sat in a cafe without ordering in mid-April. The two, waiting to discuss real estate with a third man, were charged with trespassing.
The company promised to train its nearly 175,000 employees on "racial-bias education" on Tuesday, when it closes its 8,000 locations for a day. Starbucks decreed that all customers may now have access to its public spaces and bathrooms, whether they buy something or not.
The company wants people to think of Starbucks as a "third place" — coming after work and home. But for those without a job or a house, Starbucks is sometimes the "first place."
The majority of trespass calls made by some of the busiest Starbucks in the Tampa Bay area were complaints about homeless people, the Tampa Bay Times found.
The Times looked at 65 free-standing Starbucks in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco Counties. Between 2013 and 2018, employees and sometimes patrons of those locations called law enforcement 1,039 times for complaints related to trespassing.
The Starbucks where Adams fell asleep had 95 of these calls in five years, according to records reviewed by the Times. More than half were requests to get rid of homeless people, and 24 ended in an arrest or the person being banned for a year.
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In 2015, Calvin Williams, who was then 65, walked into the First Avenue Starbucks and declared it to be his, according to police reports.
"This is my Starbucks," Williams said with arms crossed to police.
During a four-month span between 2015 and 2016, Williams was arrested 10 times at the store on First Avenue and once at the Starbucks at 900 Fourth St. N.
Asked why he kept coming back, Williams told police, "I own the Starbucks and the property it is on, and the employees and customers should be the people who are trespassed from it."
The current store manager referred a reporter to the Starbucks corporate office, which pointed to a policy posted online this month.
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Explore all your options"When using a Starbucks space, we respectfully request that customers behave in a manner that maintains a warm and welcoming environment," it said, requesting that customers use spaces as intended, be considerate, communicate with respect and act responsibly.
Two previous managers of locations in the Tampa Bay area were willing to share their experiences.
Homeless arrest numbers do not surprise Dana Nichols, 30, who spent four of his six years with the company as shift manager and barista at the First Avenue location.
Nichols made many of those calls to police. He said he ultimately lost his job for flipping off a customer who began recording a police trespass call.
Most Starbucks locations get homeless people, Nichols said, but he seemed to get the disruptive ones.
Close to two years later, he still remembers Williams. Nichols said he would give Williams free water and let him stay as long as he behaved, but Williams would aggressively panhandle customers, shout and get angry with staff.
Court records show a judge ordered a psychological evaluation of Williams after a January 2016 trespassing arrest, and after that, the police reports stopped.
Nichols said the near daily interaction with the transient community wore him down.
The store is a minute walk from Williams Park, where homeless people congregate beneath shade trees, some sleeping on blankets in the grass. The park occupies an entire city block.
"I've had guys come up to the counter with open wounds, take all the condiments they can and put it in their free cup of water," Nichols said.
He heard about the open access policy Starbucks announced after the Philadelphia arrests. He's skeptical.
"We had locks on the bathroom for a reason," he said. "We found needles and drug paraphernalia in there one too many times."
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When Tampa police first questioned Jerry Nixon about why he was at the Starbucks at 715 S Howard Ave., he said he was waiting for the district attorney.
Employees said he was harassing customers, and police issued Nixon, then 44, a trespass warning.
A year later, when employees called the police on Nixon again, he walked up to the officers, held out his hands and asked to be arrested, according to reports.
"The defendant then said he would plead the Fifth to any further questions and explained he did not wish to continue speaking," a police officer wrote in a 2015 report. He was warned not to come back again, but as recently as last month, Starbucks workers again called the police on Nixon.
Nearly half of the 57 police calls to remove homeless people from the SoHo Starbucks were complaints about Nixon.
Police heard that Nixon hassled customers for money, threatened an employee and was once found sleeping naked.
But Mikinna Martin, 26, who worked at that Starbucks for two years as a shift manager, said she never had a problem with Nixon.
"He is a person who needs some attention mental health wise, anyone who met him would say that," Martin said. "But he is a harmless man. He was always minding his own business."
Martin would say good morning to Nixon and give him water when he asked. She didn't see him bother customers. But other shift managers didn't like Nixon hanging around and often called the police on him.
"He would stick out like a sore thumb in that area because South Tampa is a very white and affluent area," she said. Nixon is black. "Seeing Jerry walk around with his disheveled look, it could be alarming to people."
Since 2013, Nixon has received five trespass warnings and has been arrested four times at the SoHo Starbucks. Most of the time, he is gone before police can respond to the call.
During Martin's seven years with the company, she said the only time she found the homeless population "taxing" was while she was working at the store on 433 Cleveland St. in Clearwater. Of the 37 calls for trespassing made at that Starbucks, 12 resulted in an official warning or an arrest.
But even there, Martin said that the hardest part was dealing with the mess that some homeless people left.
"Sometimes they would come in from the beach and go to the restrooms and we would have to clean up after them," Martin said.
She still thinks an open door bathroom policy is a good idea.
"I understand why some locations would want to lock the bathroom doors," she said, "but I always thought it was more hassle than just letting people go in."
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Adams would have preferred the employees wake her up instead of calling the police. They later told her that they were just following policy.
"They said they tried to wake me up, but they can't physically touch me," she said. "That's why they said they called the cops."
She wasn't angry, she said. And she didn't stay away long.
She sat outside the coffee shop under a green Starbucks umbrella just after dawn Tuesday, sipping from a tall water cup given to her for free by the employees. She mixed her own powdered cocoa, partly for taste and also to make it look more like coffee.
If she's quiet and blends in, the employees might let her sit most of the day, she said.
Adams has been homeless on and off since she was 18, she said.
She mostly stays in the Williams Park area with her boyfriend, Russell Stiffs, 43. He has a history of arrests, most recently for disorderly intoxication and panhandling.
But he understands why Starbucks sometimes calls the police.
"We get it," he said. "Don't act like a fool out here and don't panhandle their customers."
Contact Jonathan Capriel at 813-225-3141 or jcapriel@tampabay.com. Follow @jonathancapriel.
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