Read on Twitter
starting now on FB live: https://www.facebook.com/799880030084316/videos/788306555325273/ https://twitter.com/BLMLA/status/1325951231840325632
The video feed is not great, but Gascon is saying he wants to honor those killed and that it is no accident that his first meeting w/ @BLMLA. Says the road to defeating systemic racism is long.
He says we incarcerate too many and that the system is not broken - it is doing exactly what it is designed to do.
We must be honest with ourselves in drawing some of the connections between the criminalization of mental health issues and poverty, etc. And that police violence is one of many structural issues that need to be addressed if we truly seek justice.
We've defunded housing, education, etc. and yet we are squeamish when we mention the defunding of police, he says. The issues we need to address are part of a larger universe.
He says they've been reviewing cases of police violence and that they have identified ~50 that they may want to revisit.
Says this is the beginning of the conversation. But there is a reason that he is visiting @BLMLA first - because they have made change happen.
These gestures do carry meaning. In 2015, Garcetti was running out the back door of his residence to avoid running into @BLMLA (who protested in front of his home) and the possibility of even being seen as having met with them. https://twitter.com/eparillon/status/1326005214390874112
they called Garcetti the "back door mayor" https://la.streetsblog.org/2015/10/21/south-l-a-town-hall-ends-in-protests-but-residents-hope-dialogue-with-mayor-is-just-beginning/
Garcetti saw @BLMLA as disruptive and was still figuring out whether it was politically expedient to say Black Lives Mattered https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1268563567134912514
. @digitalurn is speaking about the death of his sister, Mely Corado, and how LAPD had told the L.A. Times that evening that she had been shot by the suspect, when all evidence pointed to the contrary. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-trader-joes-lawsuit-20181129-story.html
"I really, really, really miss my son," says the mother of Kenneth Ross Jr. "Every day is terrible." https://lasentinel.net/officer-cleared-of-wrongdoing-in-kenneth-ross-shooting-family-still-demands-answers.html
I'm having trouble hearing all of the commenters, but the majority of the comments thus far have been family members speaking about lost loved ones, their experiences with police in the aftermath of those incidents, and asking that those cases be reopened.
While the audio cuts in and out I want to go back to something Gascón said about police violence being part of a larger universe or continuum (my word) of violence...
A lot of the cases are ruled in policy bc the moments the DA is looking at are the moments at which the officer might actually be in a struggle or fear for their lives. They are not looking necessarily at what led up to the officer finding themselves in such a position.
I think a lot abt the Ezell Ford case & the way folks in that nbhd have bn repressively policed for decades. Ford was approached by officers who were essentially performing a form of stop-&-frisk, came at him in such a way that made a struggle inevitable, & then shot him for it.
Ceebo tha Rapper made a couple of videos speaking to the way the community is policed, and media painted him as a threat. So did the LAPD. This was Ceebo (Damonte Shipp) at their video shoot in 2014.
The first video from @CeeboThaRapper
The second, after @CeeboThaRapper realized he was being painted in the media as threatening LAPD
The headlines at the time, "Obscenity-Laced Rap Video Believed To Threaten Police Officers" https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/08/22/obscenity-laced-rap-video-believed-to-threaten-police-officers/
Shortly after filming those videos, Ceebo/DaMonte Shipp was sentenced to 17 years in prison for a robbery that he says he did not commit. http://theantimedia.org/ceebo-tha-rapper-prison/
What I'm saying is that it is a continuum... the visible injustices are the killings. But it's the cumulative impact of repressive policing that facilitates these killings and the subsequent clearing of officers for wrongdoing.
As I listen to yet another family member tearing their heart out over the killing of a loved one and asking for justice, the words of Jackie Lacey as spoken to @JamesQueallyLAT are even more difficult to stomach https://twitter.com/JamesQueallyLAT/status/1326011553867472896
Especially this one. Imagine thinking there was no point in meeting with the mother of a mistakenly-identified young man who was shot in the head so many times that a bullet came out of his mouth, per his mother's testimony https://twitter.com/JamesQueallyLAT/status/1326011602588463104
Now speaking is the grandmother of Keith Bursey, Ms. Mary Wilson. Bursey was recovering from a gunshot wound to the thigh when he was killed by Charles Kumlander in June 2016 - the officer who had responded to Bursey's shooting two months earlier.
Wilson had been dismayed to see Kumlander (seen searching a woman’s purse below) entrusted to give L.A. Times reporters a baseline for what constituted a lawful stop in her community.
Bursey had been killed during just one such stop. From some background I dug up on his case last year:
Bursey had tried to run, likely so as to avoid being sent back to jail on a violation of parole/probation. LAPD painted him as the aggressor, something made easier by his affiliation with the 60s.
The official ruling on Bursey's killing is heavily redacted.
Bursey knew his rights. He'd appealed unlawful searches in court before. So he was likely aware of how things were going to unfold that night as soon as police pulled them over in that parking lot.
Bursey's loss was commemorated in @iminfantJStone's "Ride on 'em"
