Kareem El was standing outside of a bar in Okinawa, Japan, last month waiting for a friend when a U.S. military police patrol approached him and asked him to show his identification.
The bar, on a busy commercial street, was a few hundred yards from Kadena Air Base, a sprawling U.S. military installation where 18,000 Americans and more than 4,000 Japanese employees and contractors are based or work. According to El, who is Black, the patrol had not asked other people on the street to provide an ID.
El, 32, a former U.S. Marine Corps captain who once served in Okinawa and now lives in Washington, D.C., said he told the patrol that he was a civilian and didn’t have to provide identification. A back-and-forth ensued. Then, in a video filmed by his friend, El is seen standing with his hands in his pockets as a member of the patrol picks him up and throws him to the sidewalk.
“I f—ing told you not to touch me,” El says as he is being held down and handcuffed. “You have no right to touch me right now.”
In a second video, taken about an hour later in a parking lot at the base, El is shown having the handcuffs removed. An officer tells El it was legal for them to detain him.
“You are in our jurisdiction,” he says.
Footage of the encounter soon went viral, drawing millions of views as of Wednesday.
Now the military says El’s detention was “a mistake.”
The commander of U.S. Forces Japan, which oversees U.S. military personnel and bases in Japan, has ordered an investigation of the incident and has “paused all unilateral patrols while we conduct retraining of patrol members,” Col. John Severns, a USFJ spokesman, said in an email Tuesday.
“While the investigation is still ongoing, it is clear that the detention of Mr. El was a mistake on the part of the patrol, who approached him solely because they believed he was a U.S. servicemember,” Severns said.
El said the incident in the early morning hours of Nov. 22 was “scary and traumatizing.”
“I’d much rather be on folks’ minds for the work I’ve been doing but I think the fact that this gained so much attention is a testament to how truly outrageous it is,” he said about the video.
A native Washingtonian who graduated from School Without Walls, a public magnet D.C. high school, and Howard University, El owns his own company and serves on the board of the Atlas Performing Arts Theater.
He believes he was stopped, he said, because patrol members assumed that anyone who is Black in Okinawa must be in the military.
“I have to believe that on some level when they saw me they saw someone that they could not perceive to have been a captain in the Marine Corps who has been out of the Marine Corps for six years and is now the CEO of a tech company launching a product in Okinawa,” he said. “That’s not what was in their head.”
Stars and Stripes, the military’s independent news organization, reported last month that the patrols were instituted to enforce an order prohibiting service members from drinking alcohol off base between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.
Lee Merritt, a civil rights lawyer who is representing El, said he and El have opened their own investigation and will explore any possible claims to bring against the military. They will also seek to determine if what happened to El has happened to others and what the military is doing in response.
“Are they removing a discriminatory policy of identifying Black men of military age and demanding ID and resorting to violence if they don’t comply?” Merritt said. “And is there a history of this?”
Merritt said three people have reached out in the past week to say they had the same thing happen to them.
El has seen numerous comments on the videos, including from people claiming to be in the military, saying he should have just shown his identification and complied. But that, he said, would be to accept that as a Black man he should be subject to different standards and rights.
“As people who take an oath to support and defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, we have an obligation to act in a way that supports and defends the Constitution,” El said. “It’s really sad to me that so many people that consider themselves, you know, blue-blood Americans don’t see this as a very clear affront against American values and American law.”
El, whose father was also a Marine and was awarded a Purple Heart in Vietnam, said he had never had a similar encounter with law enforcement in the past. The experience brought home broader issues of race and justice and how the encounter could have ended differently.
“How many of these videos do we see of other Black men in similar situations? How many of those where maybe they don’t have the opportunity to tell their story to you after the fact?” he said.
The post Military admits ‘mistake’ in viral arrest of U.S. civilian in Japan appeared first on Washington Post.
