A San Francisco woman has been dubbed “Permit Patty” after she called the cops on an 8-year-old girl for selling bottled water without a permit.
Eight-year-old Jordan and her mother, Erin Austin, were selling bottled water outside their apartment complex near AT&T Park when Alison Ettel, another resident of the complex, approached and asked if they had a permit.
In a video uploaded to Instagram by Austin on Saturday, Ettel can be seen on the phone with police.”This woman don’t want to let a little girl sell some water,” Austin says in the video. “She’s calling police on an 8-year-old little girl.”
“Yeah, um, illegally selling water without a permit,” Ettel retorts.
The video quickly went viral. Ettel later told ABC News that she’d been working from home when Jordan began “loudly” selling water outside her apartment for hours. She also said she never spoke to Jordan, but did admit to calling the police just to find out “if what they were doing was legal.” She did not file a report.
Understandably, Austin and her daughter were upset. “She comes out and demands the permit for my daughter,” Austin told ABC News. “She said if we didn’t give it to her she’d call the cops. So I said, ‘Okay, call the cops.’ And she did.”
“The lady called the police because I didn’t have a permit,” Jordan added.
Unfortunately, while calling the cops on an 8-year-old is certainly extreme, this sort of thing is happening more and more under the nanny state:
In Montgomery County, Md., children were fined $500 for operating an illegal lemonade stand outside the Congressional Country Club. In Texas, police shut down two little sisters’ lemonade stand for want of a $150 “peddler’s permit”; the town fathers agreed to waive the $150 fee — but insisted that the girls needed the health department’s sign-off first. In Iowa, men with guns were dispatched to stop a four-year-old girl from selling lemonade during a bicycle race. In New Castle, N.Y., city councilman Michael Wolfensohn dispatched armed men to a local park to stop children from selling unlicensed cupcakes and — horrors! — unregulated Rice Krispie treats.
Jordan was reportedly selling water in an effort to raise funds for a trip to Disneyland. Is it really too much to ask that children be allowed to learn the value of entrepreneurship and hard work?
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