Arrests expose system of “separate justice,” say Black leaders

Rajnii Eddins is glad he got arrested for asking a police officer a question. Maybe now, the poet and teacher says, the Seattle Police Department will be forced to change how it treats African Americans.

On the afternoon of April 5, while walking to Rainier Beach High School, where he is currently directing a student play about the evils of smoking, Eddins saw a female student being handcuffed and put in a squad car. Concerned that the girl’s parents be notified, Eddins says he approached three officers slowly and calmly, told them he works at the high school, and asked what the girl was being charged with.

The next thing he knew, the soft-spoken 26-year-old who grew up in Rainier Valley was being handcuffed and arrested on a charge of obstructing an officer — one of three racially biased arrests that the NAACP says police have made in the past two months alone.

In a press conference called April 16 at City Hall, Eddins, Michael Brooks, and Anjonet Hill — none of whom had ever been arrested before — stood with Seattle-King County NAACP chief James Bible, who told their stories and demanded that police stop the arrests and abuse.

On Feb. 5, 62-year-old Michael Brooks was detained as he was walking past a park on Capitol Hill where an attempted rape had just occurred (“72 Hours: Held three days for a crime he claims he didn’t commit, a man seeks answers,” RC March 21). On Feb. 18, during Pioneer Square’s Mardi Gras celebration, Anjonet Hill says she had just left a club when a fight broke out on the street.

“All of a sudden I hit the ground from a sock to the back of my head,” the 23-year-old Tukwila mother says. An officer had knocked her to the curb to handcuff her, she says, dislocating her jaw in the process.

“We have a problem in Seattle,” Bible told reporters. “The problem is police misconduct. The problem is racial profiling. The problem is a separate system of justice for African-Americans and people of color.”

It’s a longstanding problem, Bible said, that requires changes at SPD, including turning the Office of Professional Accountability, an internal police unit that investigates and reports on citizen complaints, into a unit overseen by citizens — something leaders of the Black community have demanded for years.

An SPD spokesperson declined to comment on the allegations of racial bias. But, after the press conference, the department issued a statement pointing out that the findings of its complaint office are reviewed by an independent civilian auditor and a citizen board.

In response to inquiries about Eddins, media officer Debra Brown says that race was not a factor in his arrest. The officers had just broken up a fight involving 10 to 15 juveniles at the Lake Washington Apartments, a complex, she says, that’s known for problems with increasing violence. The girl who was arrested, she says, had been taunting the officers, who ran a check on her and found she had a warrant.

Bible and K.L. Shannon of the Racial Disparity Project say the police often describe a neighborhood as violent in order to justify their actions. But, with Eddins, they say, it won’t wash: He is a devoted youth leader known in part for serving as a big brother to the 54 foster children his mother helped raise over the years.

At his arraignment last week, “There had to be over 60 people there to support him,” Shannon says of the packed courtroom. “That alone is a message being sent to the city” that the police made a serious mistake — one that could cost Eddins his career. If the record of the arrest isn’t expunged, as the NAACP is calling for, Bible says, schools won’t hire him in the future.

Shannon says she and the NAACP are currently working to collect other stories of racially motivated arrests to document the pattern. While going to jail was “pretty ridiculous,” Eddins says, he believes the incident will serve a higher purpose.

“It’s a good opportunity,” he says. “Since I have no record and no prior arrest, it exposes in a clear and decisive manner the racism of the Seattle Police Department and the need for discourse and dialog and some form of reconciliation between community members and the Seattle Police Department.”

cgillis@realchangenews.org