Thread by @sahrasulaiman

Finishing a companion piece to my look at the Sheriff's blatant falsehoods around the shooting of #DijonKizzee and I am still struck by how little traction this story has gotten.
la.streetsblog.org/2020/09/18/gun…

In part, I think the challenge is that the story acknowledges Kizzee was armed. Police narratives have groomed media into seeing a 1-to-1 relationship btwn being armed/gangbanger & intention/aggression/criminality that complicates the story for those seeking more perfect victims.

I've made multiple threads about why it is important to talk about how/why folks might be armed and will talk about it more in the forthcoming story, but just for reference...

It's a topic that came up a lot this summer, for sure:

But perhaps the way into understanding the significance of the Sheriff's lies is this crucial piece of information: The Sheriffs are not contracted to do traffic enforcement in Westmont/West Athens. That's CHP's purview. From my upcoming story:

A snapshot of a map included in L.A. County’s Vision Zero Plan for Safer Roadways 2020–2025 shows Westmont/West Athens as one of the county’s unincorporated communities where CHP handles traffic enforcement. The blue “X” marks 110th/Budlong, where LASD first engaged #DijonKizzee.

This hasn't stopped LASD from conducting stops, of course. Between July of 2018 and December of 2019 in Westmont/West Athens, they stopped over 2300 people [W/WA has a pop. of ~41,000 people]. LASD's own data:
data.lacounty.gov/Public-Safety/…

It was weird to see the stop of a subject in my story detailed like this in that data, given both the bogus justification he says he was given & all that he has described that happened. They say the stop lasted 10 minutes. Meanwhile, he's not sure how he's not dead.

The data doesn't talk about how often LASD reaches into your car to open the door and pull you out (or punching you in the face) before even greeting you.
ktla.com/news/local-new…

LASD needs to conduct these stops - they provide legal justification to do further probes. Without that, they're just doing stop-&-frisk, as Villanueva essentially acknowledged last week (tho he definitely wouldn't agree that was the point of his remarks):

But folks in the community understand what these stops are about. The speed w/ which sheriffs fly up Budlong on the wrong side of the road and nearly collide head-on with a black car refutes any claims that this was about Kizzee's safety.

The Sheriff SUV is leaning to one side with the force of the effort to avoid the black car that was just minding its business on the right side of the road.

This is the reason Kizzee ran. He knew it was not about his safety. He knew it was to see if there was a reason to throw him in jail and make the kind of your-tax-dollars-at-work claim that both LASD & LAPD love at his expense...

I've been tryna finish this story for a while now. But showing how this wasn't BWB but biking-while-Black-in-a-disenfranchised-Black-community-(which-is-simultaneously-overpoliced/underpoliced)-and-punished-for-finding-alternative-ways-to-feel-safe-in-the-streets takes time.

Hopefully I'll be done later today, but in the meanwhile...maybe all that laid out above will help folks understand why this is so appalling. la.streetsblog.org/2020/09/18/gun…

The family of #DijonKizzee and their representation are holding a press conference right now. The feed keeps cutting out, but at least part of it can be found here facebook.com/NajeeLAactivis…

In the meanwhile, if you need more background into what I'm talking about with regard to the overpolicing/underpolicing dynamic in disenfranchised communities and how youth try to navigate that, Nipsey Hussle's story is a good entry point. la.streetsblog.org/2019/08/15/nip…

So is Slimm's. la.streetsblog.org/2018/05/01/i-c…

So someone reached out to tell me that he'd just heard that his cousin, Tsuppa, had been killed. Dijon Kizzee appears in his Who Shot Ya video from 2018. A troll on this young man's IG gloated that that was now four from the nbhd killed just this summer.

There's police storming down Breonna Taylor's door and then there's the kind of repressive policing & disenfranchisement that leaves youth feeling like they have to fend for themselves. It's a continuum. Or 2 sides of the same coin. Or whatever metaphor tells you its all related.

But I'm thinking about all the young talent and lives taken. A few years ago and a few blocks away (though very different nbhd), it was Kenneth Peevy, who was a founder of the HarvardBoyz movement. He's memorialized here.