Vol. 74/No. 21      May 31, 2010

The picket was in response to a video shown on local television May 6. The video, shot in the early morning hours of April 17, shows Seattle cops who had stopped three young men and forced them to lie face down on the sidewalk. Detective Shandy Cobain, a member of the gang unit, is heard telling one of them, 21-year-old Martin Monetti, “I’m going to beat the [expletive] Mexican piss out of you, homey. You feel me?” A short time later, Cobain kicked Monetti’s hand and the side of his head. Another cop, Mary Lynn Woollum, is seen stomping on the back of Monetti’s knee or leg.

Stacia Hawkinson, a high school teacher at the picket line, told the Militant, “So many of our students that I know personally have been abused physically by the police, and it’s wrong. How could I not be here protesting?” Hawkinson carried a hand-lettered sign that featured pictures of Monetti and Malika Calhoun, a 15-year-old student who was assaulted in a holding cell by two cops in 2009.

Protester Isis Sanchez described other cases of police harassment. “I was walking with my brother, who is half Black, and a cop pulled over and asked if we were looking into a car we had just walked past.” After asking about the car, “he asked me, ‘Does your mom know you’re with him?’” Others at the picket reported that passersby described physical abuse and harassment at the hands of the Seattle police.

The first television station to receive the video did not air it. Photographer Jud Morris who filmed the video released it first on the Internet and then to another station that broadcast it three weeks after the incident. The first station fired Morris.
 
 
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