Law & Order: Special Dog Unit

Last Spring a cab driver refused to pick me up in front of the Hilton on Michigan Avenue. “I’m not taking her with that dog,” he said, then sped away.
The doorman took down the cab’s license number, then told me what it was. I got into the next cab and recorded the number onto my handheld tape recorder. Once I got to work I phoned the City of Chicago Department of Consumer Services to file a complaint.
Last Friday was our day in court.
Mike walked outside with Hanni and me Friday morning to hail a cab for us. I still can hardly believe what happened next. A cab slowed down, the driver looked past Mike and saw me standing there with Hanni. “No dog,” he said.
“It’s a Seeing Eye dog,” Mike explained. “A service dog.”
“No dog,” the driver said.
Mike was angry. “You’re going to court!” he shouted at the driver
“I don’t care,” the driver said, then sped away.
So my Seeing Eye dog and I were refused a cab ride on my way to testify against a cab driver who refused to give us a ride. Who needs fiction?
Mike took this driver’s license number down; I’ll be calling the city next week.
But for now, I needed to focus on the court case at hand. The cab driver I’d accused of refusing us at the Hilton had hired an attorney, and the attorney did everything he could to twist my story around. How far were you from the curb? How long did the cab sit there before it took off? You say the cab driver said he wouldn’t take you with the dog. Did the doorman and cab driver say anything after that? What did they say? You don’t know? How is it that you heard the cab driver say he wouldn’t take you with the dog, but then you couldn’t hear if they said anything to each other after that?
That last question was an easy one. “He was emphatic when he said he wouldn’t take me with the dog,” I said. “It was easy to hear him.”
The doorman testified by phone. I had to leave the room for that part, but I found out later that our stories didn’t jive. He told the court that it was a very busy day – I’d said the cab had time to sit there for 30 seconds before speeding away. The doorman couldn’t remember exactly what the cab driver looked like. “It was hard to see him through the partition,” he explained. That means it would have been hard for me to hear the cab driver through the partition, too – How could I have heard him say he wasn’t taking the dog.
And then it turned out this cab doesn’t have a partition at all. The cab driver’s attorney suggested the doorman got the wrong license number, it wasn’t this guy.
The only problem with that was that the cab driver had already given a statement that he didn’t see the dog when he’d refused me a ride. So he’d already admitted to not giving me a ride. But he said he’d been driving a cab since 1993, in those years he’d carried hundreds of Seeing Eye dogs and plenty of pet dogs in his cab. His ex-wife and her mother had a dog when they lived together. What kind of dog, he was asked. A German shepherd, he thought. He got along fine with that dog.
The doorman had testified that someone was standing right behind me that day with a lot of luggage. The attorney suggested the cab driver was so focused on the prospect of a big fare to the airport that he looked right past me.
In the end the judge ruled in our favor. “A hotel doorman looks at hundreds of cab drivers a day,” he said. The fact that the doorman wasn’t able to describe a cab driver who pulled up in front of the Hilton six months ago wasn’t enough to throw out the case. The judge said it was very nice to hear that the cab driver had picked up dogs before, but that didn’t really have much to do with what had happened in front of the Hilton Hotel in April.
The driver was found guilty of two charges. The first was for simply refusing to pick up a passenger of any sort. For that, he was fined $200. He was also found guilty of refusing to pick up a person with a service dog. For that he was fined $500 and had his license suspended for 29 days.
I did not do a dance of joy when this was over. Thing is, I really like cab drivers. They’re hard workers. I like chatting with them when I’m sitting in back. I tip them well. I feel a sort of bond with them – many of them are minorities, like me. Many of them are qualified for other jobs but have had to settle for something else. Like me. I know driving a cab was this guy’s livelihood. I didn’t like the idea of his license being suspended.
But I don’t like being refused a ride, either.
I don’t really want to go to court again, but I’m going to go ahead and file a complaint about the guy who didn’t pick Hanni and me up on the way to court Friday. I have a feeling cab drivers talk to each other a lot. If word gets out that drivers are getting their licenses suspended for refusing a service dog, well, maybe I won’t have to file complaints anymore.