Dozens of young people protested in Washington DC on Tuesday after cellphone video emerged showing police aggressively restraining an 18-year-old scholarship student and musician.
Friends of Jason Goolsby, who is African American, were among those who took to streets in the city’s south-east section to demonstrate against his detention on Monday evening by city officers who were responding to a call alleging suspicious activity outside a bank.
Youth shutting it down for their classmate #JusticeForJasonDC #justiceforJason pic.twitter.com/fn1tyFyoFe
— Noor Mir (@thedronalisa) October 13, 2015
#justiceforJason protestors briefly block DC bus, told by police to get on sidewalk but are walking down 8th St NE pic.twitter.com/zUssRfXQ26
— Andrew Giambrone (@AndrewGiambrone) October 13, 2015
Footage filmed by a friend showed Goolsby yelling and screaming as he was manhandled by two officers, who twisted his arms behind his back and placed their knees on his body to keep him on the ground. “I’m not resisting,” he said, as one officer appeared to prepare to handcuff him.
The friend, who was identified in the clip as Mike, posted the video on Twitter on Monday evening. He wrote that the pair had been “harassed and assaulted because ‘someone felt uncomfortable around us’ at the bank”. The footage showed that Mike was also detained by officers after they ordered him to step back. Officials claimed he was “interfering with police”. Neither man was officially arrested.
Lieutenant Sean Conboy of the metropolitan police department said in an emailed statement that the call to police claimed that “three subjects may be trying to rob people at the ATM” in the area of 6th St and Pennsylvania Ave SE.
“Officers in the area responded to the assignment,” said Conboy. “One individual fled on foot from the police, was chased, and then taken down. The individual resisted, and was handcuffed while resisting after he refused to stop.”
Conboy later confirmed that “no criminal act was found to have taken place after the individuals were stopped and interviewed” and said the department was “reviewing the circumstances surrounding the stop to ensure that policies and procedures were followed”.
Goolsby is understood to have graduated from Washington’s Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts this year. Last December he was awarded a $1,000 college scholarship by Alpha Phi Alpha, the black fraternity whose alumni include Martin Luther King Jr and Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice on the US supreme court.
Described by his school as “an aspiring rapper”, he has recorded music under the names Kid Kwesi and Jay Cousteau.
While studying there, he recorded a tribute to Richard Wright titled My School Is So Awesome and performed the track at school events. Erika Totten, an activist who identified herself online as one of Goolsby’s former teachers, described him as “one of the sweetest boys I’ve ever had the honor of teaching”.
