I don’t have insight into Beck as a chief but I did lose at least half my hearing when someone threw an M80 at him while I was interviewing him. Went off next to my head. The story was about what had gone down in MacArthur Park a day or two before. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_MacA…
He was deputy chief under Bratton at the time and was handling the terrible press after LAPD beat up a bunch of protesters and kicked the shit out of some of my coworkers in the process. My hearing never did come back in that ear.
This is a pointless story, but it’s also why I can’t hear in one ear and I think of that, and of what happened at MacArthur Park during an immigration protest that May, every time I see his name.
Also 2007 was 12 years ago. And we’re still right where we were with immigration (that’s what the May Day melee, as local reporters called it, was about.) It’s almost as if...
