Fourteen teenage Asian American students, participants in a youth leadership program, were stopped for jaywalking while crossing a street in the International District on their way to a downtown art studio on Monday, July 9.
The students say they were held for 45 minutes while Officer Jess Pitts lined them up against a wall, yelled at them, and asked several times if they spoke English. Officer Larry Brotherton, when called in for backup, also made derogatory comments about the students' ethnicity, saying he had been to their country while in the Army.
When Mayor Paul Schell heard about the event on Monday evening, he apologized and asked for the names of the officers, and offered to assist in filing a complaint with the Seattle Police Department, according to the Northwest Asian Weekly, the paper that finally broke the story four days after it happened.
"We've got to stop these officers. They ought to represent the city [properly]," an unusually blunt Schell said in the July 14 edition of the Northwest Asian Weekly. "We have many good cops, but some are not. They need training."
The paper also said Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske called its office the day after the incident to apologize.
Both Schell and Kerlikowske acted quickly to mend relations with leaders in the Asian American community, something that didn't happen as readily after a similar situation with the police in the Central District two months ago.
The incident with the students calls to mind the May 31 death of Aaron Roberts, a black man in the Central District whom police stopped for erratic driving late at night. After he was pulled over, Roberts was shot by a white officer while allegedly dragging another officer with his car.
The two incidents evoked similar feelings in the respective communities--mistrust of the police and anger over institutional racism. But city officials have treated the communities differently, raising the question of whether the city has a different sensitivity meter for Asians than for blacks.
The Asian American community has received more attention from city leaders in the week after the teens were stopped than the African American community has received in the two months since Roberts' death. Mayor Schell and Chief Kerlikowske have bent over backward trying to mend relations in the International District.
In addition to their bold comments to the Northwest Asian Weekly, Schell and Kerlikowske were present one week later at the International District's Asian Resource Center on King Street to explain the city's position yet again. The press conference was attended by numerous Asian American leaders in addition to several of the students stopped by Officer Pitts.
Chief Kerlikowske also briefed members of the city council about the incident on the day the front-page story hit the streets.
The International District incident also dominated the first hour of the July 13 joint meeting of the Seattle City Council's Public Safety and Technology Committee and the Housing, Human Services, and Civil Rights Committee. The meeting was supposed to be about racial profiling, the Office of Professional Accountability, and video cameras in squad cars.
These quick responses were strikingly different from the way the mayor and the police chief handled the Central District community following Roberts' death and the protests that followed.
For example, not only did Mayor Schell and Chief Kerlikowske come out with immediate and strong comments about the International District incident, but they also didn't hesitate to meet with community leaders several days later.
The Central District had to wait nearly two weeks after Roberts' death to meet face to face with the mayor and the chief, although leaders were demanding their presence in the neighborhood days after the shooting. Mayor Schell and Chief Kerlikowske attended a community meeting in the Central District on June 13.
The mayor and City Council Member Peter Steinbrueck have both apologized for the treatment of the teens by the police officer, causing some to note that Central District residents have yet to hear an apology for racial profiling or Roberts' death.
Granted, the facts of the two cases are quite different: Roberts was an older man stopped for late-night erratic driving after he backed across two lanes of traffic on 23rd Avenue East. The students in the International District are kids who were stopped in a pedestrian crosswalk during the day. Roberts was later found to have a criminal record, while the students have no known prior history with the police.
The lawyer representing the students, Yvonne Kinoshita Ward, says that the city's swift apologies to the group likely stem from the age of those involved, not their race.
"These were students and adults stopped in broad daylight," Ward says. "It's not race, it's the fact pattern."
Leaders in the Asian American community have joined with African American leaders to address common concerns of racial profiling.
Dustin Washington, an activist with the People's Coalition for Justice, sees the two events as a reason for unity between Asian Americans and African Americans. The two communities are making similar demands, including greater police accountability and appropriate disciplinary action against the officers involved in both incidents.
"Events like these bridge the divide between people of color, and show that we do have a uniting enemy, which is racism," Washington says. "We share a common problem."
While Washington's comments go in the same direction as Schell's--both are trying to move the communities past these events and toward a solution--they ignore the fact that Schell and Kerlikowske aren't treating the communities equally. Residents in the Central District had to resort to a Starbucks boycott to get city leaders' attention, while folks in the International District just needed to get their story in the weekly community paper.
