Woman filmed calling police on Black men for shovelling snow outside her house

Gregory McAdory posted video of the ‘racist’ confrontation on TikTok

A video posted to TikTok shows a Rockford, Illinois woman calling the police on two Black men as they shovelled snow off the sidewalk in front of her house.

Gregory McAdory told the Daily Beast that on 17 February, following a major snowstorm in the Rockford area, he and his friend went to the house of another friend’s father so they could shovel his sidewalk. After they finished removing snow from in front of the first house, the two men moved to the sidewalk outside of a neighbour’s house.

That’s when the trouble began. According to Mr McAdory, the neighbour, an elderly white woman, came out of her house in an agitated state.

“Are you seriously mad because we cleaned off your sidewalk?” one of the men can be heard asking in the TikTok video posted to Mr McAdory’s account on 18 February.

In response, the woman begins shovelling snow accumulated on her front lawn back onto the sidewalk. She then tells the men not to trespass and threatens to call the police, removing her cell phone from her jacket pocket as one of the men continues to shovel snow off the sidewalk.

The confrontation continues in this vein, with the men, who operate a snow removal company, telling the woman that the sidewalk is public and that they are doing her a favour by shovelling it. The woman then calls the police, reporting that the two men are bothering her, identifying them as “African-American,” and accusing them of not giving her “respect.”

Mr McAdory’s friend asks him if he’s streaming the confrontation on Facebook Live, to which he responds that he’s recording it for his own purposes but plans to post on social media later. The fact that Mr McAdory was recording the incident appeared to upset the woman.

“He’s taking a movie, taking pictures, someone that I don’t know,” the woman can be heard saying.

This was not Mr McAdroy’s first run-in with the neighbour, who he said had threatened to call the police on him in the past as well. He said that his friend’s family has known the woman for 15 years.

A handful of police officers eventually did respond to the scene, but only stayed for roughly 20 minutes and did not file a report. They reportedly told Mr McAdory and his associate to stay off of the woman’s property and refrain from shovelling her sidewalk, while also speculating that the woman might have mental health issues.

In a second video posted to his TikTok, Mr McAdory records the encounter with police — telling the officers that he’s innocent of any misconduct and that the next time the woman calls the police, he’s prepared to press charges against her “to the fullest extent of the law.”