Remember this incident caught on video…..

Apparently in Seattle, two officers beating an unarmed man and calling him “a Mexican”, and not as an identifier but rather as a slur, is not a hate crime.

From Colorlines:

King County prosecuting attorney Dan Satterberg wrote in his decision:

Cobane will not be charged with the felony crime of malicious harassment because prosecutors have found that he did not intentionally target or assault a person because of their race or national origin, as required under the State’s hate crime statute.

Satterberg explained that in order to charge Cobane with a hate crime, the 15-year Seattle Police Department veteran would have had to “maliciously and intentionally target[ed] Mr. Monetti due to his ethnicity.” Cobane merely “lawfully detained Mr. Monetti and the other two men because they had a reasonable belief that the men were involved in two armed robberies.” The prosecutor acknowledged that Cobane detained Monetti and his companions because they fit a description of Latino males who had been involved in a robbery nearby.

Satterberg also defended Cobane’s verbal and physical abuse. Cobane’s actions toward Monetti were not racially motivated, the prosecutor wrote, because he did not also beat up the two Latino men Monetti was with. The prosecutor also wrote that police have the right to use physical force “beyond what an ordinary citizen would be allowed to use so long as the force is reasonable in the performance of their duties.”

This decision sets a dangerous precedent as anti-immigrant hate and racial profling both rise. It allows law enforcement to racially profile and use excessive force against suspects who “fit the description”.
This is the perfect example as to why all the calls for the Latino community across the country to not fear the police as those with “Latino looks” are targeted for hate crimes fall on deaf ears. With local police across the country involved with immigration programs like 287(g), dealing with law enforcement for Latinos becomes an issue of physical safety and survival over criminal “justice”.