Though it was initially reported that Showell was calling the Portland Police Department to report the matter, she was actually speaking to a dispatcher with the Portland Bureau of Transportation's parking enforcement hotline, Portland Mercury reported.
The incident unfolded on Monday, moments after Rashsaan Muhammad and Mattie Khan spotted Showell standing across the street, taking a look at their car as they picked up their food from a local eatery.
It wasn't until the pair returned to their vehicle that things quickly escalated, once they noticed Showell giving the license plate number to the dispatcher. The recording captures the moments after the initial confrontation between the involved parties.
"This is another white person calling the police on a black person because she says we're illegally parked right here," Khan says, before Showell interrupts to point out that the vehicle is sticking out slightly in front of the crosswalk.
"You can't block the crosswalk… you can't block the crosswalk," Showell tells Khan. "Look at this. You are!"
Fed up with the woman's need to play the neighborhood parking police, Muhammad and Khan urged her to go back home.
"Go back to your f**king neighborhood, you're not from here. Not doing that shit," Muhammad said. "If you're calling about a car that's been parked less than five minutes across the crosswalk, you ain't from here."
"You're an idiot," he added.
Throughout the brief exchange of words, the woman claimed that she was in fact a resident of the North Portland community. The video cuts off as the woman attempts to issue a correction by stating that the vehicle was illegally parked for more like 10 minutes.
Speaking to the Portland Mercury, Muhammad indicated that he'd attempted to initiate a conversation with Showell; however, she ultimately shut him down.
"I tried to start a conversation. I asked her who she was calling and what was going on," Muhammad said. "She didn't try to talk to us. She just called the police."
"Why would people spend the time just trying to make our lives harder instead of talking it out like neighbors?" he questioned.
The couple made the decision to share the video not as another example of white residents calling the police on people of color, but to show the lack of communication and empathy between neighbors, according to the outlet.
"New people come in and change a neighborhood, and it causes these kind of stressful situations," Muhammad said. "We don't interact with each other they way we used to."
Although it is unclear if Showell knew that the owners of the vehicle were people of color, she has been dubbed "Crosswalk Cathy," by netizens, joining a long list of hair-trigger police-callers that includes the likes of "Barbeque Becky" and "Pool Patrol Paula."
