n Saturday, July 23rd, Alison Ettel called police on a young girl selling water without a permit in Oakland, CA. The girl's relative caught a video of Ettel, tweeted it out, and an Internet rage mob had identified her and her business within hours.

Twitter quickly dubbed the then-unidentified woman in the video #PermitPatty.

The video is frustrating. It starts midway through an altercation with Permit Patty, a grown woman more than capable of remonstrating with a child, on the phone with what one assumes is the Oakland Police Department. Upon seeing herself filmed, she ducks behind a brick wall until the seller's cousin confronts her personally.

(Ettel has since claimed that she was only "pretending" to call the police and did so after an altercation with the girl's mother.)

Most of the discussion around #PermitPatty (and her metaphorical accomplice, #BBQBecky, another Oakland woman who called police on a black man using a charcoal grill in a public park) focuses on the racial element at play. Patty and Becky are well-educated white women calling the police on black people committing what are, at-best, nonviolent infractions of municipal code.

Permit Patty may be a racist, I don't know.