Thread by @sahrasulaiman

Getting a late start on the Garcetti press conference but here we go.

https://twitter.com/MayorOfLA/status/1267170209925722113

Words are being said: "Our conscience demands that we translate our pain into passionate calls for justice. That we speak the truth & act to end the racism that took the life of #GeorgeFloyd #BreonaTaylor #AhmaudArbery & too many others. Not just in past history books, bt today."

Not gonna lie, he looks like he took a hard pass on being consumed by rage. "But the rage must not consume us; it must not be turned back on us. It is only with peace that progress can follow."

He's admonishing those who "feast off of chaos" and "hunger for division" and ask that we don't project images of a country torn apart.

And then he commends @BLMLA for launching their protest in a "beautiful park," which communicates so much more than he realizes.

He's offered a declaration that "these [law enforcement] chiefs, our entire city leadership" is committed to protecting 1st am. rights...but no mention of the attacks on journalists/shooting of protesters. But I'm sure that's coming later in the speech.

https://twitter.com/ShotOn35mm/status/1266875832569483264

There's a lengthy bit about how selfless our police are for saving young girls who are sex trafficked or victims of domestic violence. He also says he knows officers are not perfect but that they get a lot of training.

Which is not a great read of the room as it is, but then...

He makes historical disenfranchisement a matter of opinion.

"We have young people in our city who *feel* that they don't get a fair start in life, that the system is racist and rigged against them. That whether it's their schools...family income...health, that they start many yards behind the starting line..."

But wait there's more.

..."And that racism and rigged feeling affects our criminal justice system and its culture and its practice."

So... people's feeling that the system is rigged against them, uh, impacts the culture of the justice system?

Help?

I have to pause bc what an incredible missed opportunity to educate Angelenos of privilege about how their comfort has come at such an incredible cost to those young people he speaks so fondly of; what policing south of the 10 has really looked like: la.streetsblog.org/2019/08/15/nip…

But also, how dare he frame it that way. I have no words.

There are unspecified young people that think racism is a thing that impacts them.

This man wanted to be president.

But the good news is everyone is helping to clean up the broken glass. So we can find common ground.

It's like something out of the Wu-Tang name generator

"Violence is never the answer, to violence even if it's thousands of miles away."

The Wu-Tang name generator is undefeated.

"We saw images of officers on the line exercising the restraint we expect of them. But we also saw people burning vehicles, jumping on buses. We saw tactics that all of us need to make sure restore the peace and find the common ground."

So much of the conversation I've tracked has been about the extent to which the focus on the property damage is once again moving the conversation away from the issues that sparked the uprisings. It's certainly happening here. Others have done better.

https://twitter.com/NicholsUprising/status/1267117041426841600

I'm only 14 minutes in and I don't believe he's even said the word "Black" yet (beyond the name of Black Lives Matter)?

I'll have to check. But he could be talking about a pool party gone awry at this point. There's no sense of the urgency of the moment.

Anyways. For those who saw my Metro thread earlier, there it is: "In consultation with Metro Board Chair Mayor James Butts...and my friend, Metro suspended service at 8 p.m. last night."

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1267135706993840128

The decision was taken out of concern for the public & drivers, but mainly, it appears, for the damage done to that single bus. No word on how the drivers sent back out onto the streets later that night were protected from such a dire threat.

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1267133305008254978

As far as the curfew, it's back on for 8pm again tonight bc there are apparently "caravans" of looters out there.

The only good news is that the National Guard is not being deployed to the South Bureau. As he says this he makes some vague reference to how people in the community "feel" about the Natl Gd showing up, again glossing over some really intense history.

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1255866677973008384

Just before handing the conf. over to Moore, he says he wants to talk about how we can take those next steps forward in the coming days bc "new generations haven't recognized what activists have achieved in changing the way we look at public safety," housing, wages, etc.

He is not having the same conversation as the people who are calling out for justice. This idea that people will just calm down and be pacified if he tells them about all the good things he thinks they don't know about is first class magical thinking.

The only thing people tell me they want to hear about is the arrest of those other three officers in MN. But you know, potatoes, potahtoes.

So LAPD Chief Moore takes the helm to tell us about all these good things that have happened in policing that young people don't know about, and it goes about as well as one might expect from the leader of a police force that attacked journalists yesterday.

"Yesterday was an opportunity for us to restart." - Moore

welp

He really said a bus was captured.

The language around policing is so fascinating. Any kind of vectors that drive behavior or clear descriptors are consistently removed - for ex., Moore mentions having seen acts of officers engaging protesters.

But there's never a shortage of language around the bravery and commitment and values of policing, such as the ones Moore saw upheld yesterday. Minus the times they weren't "perfect."

And there's this

https://twitter.com/safrazie/status/1267184012830769152

For a police force that regularly demeans and insults and uses racial epithets and swears at the Black and brown people it covers, per every interview I've ever done, to say police stood bravely in the face of insults is a lot for folks to digest.

I need a break, so I'll leave this with a quote from Slimm - one of the young ppl Garcetti would argue is uninformed about good things - who called this morning to tell me, "You know all they have to do is arrest those three other motherf*ckers, right? And this all goes away?"

God, I really regret coming back to this press conf. Garcetti either genuinely thinks people are looking at an incident in MN and "paint[ing] a caricature" of what law enforcement does in L.A. or this is a hostage video. It may be a bit of both.

Have we come a long way since press events touting the ease with which a battering ram will allow LAPD to knock down the walls of a suspected stash house? Sure.

Do our police chiefs still talk about shooting casual drug users for committing treason. Not so much: Progress!

Do we still see raids like the one at 39th and Dalton? Well, there was a sweep I recall a year or two ago where they ransacked an elderly man's home and broke doorjambs and cracked walls, so...

This was 2014 in South Central ... also shout-out to the reporter that introduced this a case of he said-she said 🙄

Do we still have these kinds of sweeps where a thousand mostly Black young men are rounded up because they lived in a neighborhood where there was a presence of drugs/gangs?

No. But there's no need bc we have the falsifying of field interview cards and gang databases that make it possible to charge folks with something random when the time is right. So let's call that one a wash.
latimes.com/california/sto…

I'm starting to feel like maybe someone should inform Garcetti about all the ways LAPD has found ways to get around all the progress that's been made.

But when asked about the tactics used against protesters and journalists yesterday, he says that in conditions of lawlessness, there's no easy way to bring law and order back.

Which, in and of itself is a weird thing to say, because the job of police, by definition, is to enforce order where it is lacking.

Like, it's their whole thing.

And things like this, from today, where LAPD drives an SUV into protesters and then speeds away a la NYPD-style, really doesn't fall into the category of bringing order to lawlessness that I am aware of.

https://twitter.com/PsychopompStdio/status/1267218325722951680

Anyways. Garcetti categorized LAPD as having "improved" and for practicing "remarkable restraint." He only really acknowledged the violence exercised by police by saying we can always find a video of "one bad thing" where "something goes wrong."

Garcetti saying 99.9% of the good things officers do never makes the news is quite a statemt when LAPD 100% shapes the framing/language/version of any incidents involving LAPD. Their framing/lang./version is almost never ?ed...which is why things like Floyd's murder are filmed.

I talked about this w/ regard to Nipsey's 2014 arrest at his store. It's hardly a unique incident, but it speaks to how much power they had to shape the narrative around someone who was visible. la.streetsblog.org/2019/08/15/nip…

I should be transcribing some of what Moore is saying but he's getting really testy about being asked about whether they have strategies for crowd control.

It brings to mind how LAPD reacted when #BlackLivesMatter first emerged and how aggressively they policed an entirely peaceful King Day parade in 2015.

I had never seen so many police there. And they were harassing Black cyclists - all of whom had paid to participate in the parade - and asking them if they were supposed to be there.
la.streetsblog.org/2015/01/20/are…

They first spotted Cortez (right) - who was just a young fixiehead at the time & excited to be in his first parade - and harassed him for not having a helmet. In a parade. That moved 1 mph. Where ppl sit ride in cars w/ no seatbelts to wave at the crowd.

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1087554224706056193

Then they got in @therealjswift's face and demanded to know whether he and the hundred+ other Black cyclists riding in circles had a right to be there. The officer even questioned the authenticity of his paperwork.

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1087563601756311552

Then they hassled the Real Rydaz. Only when the officer realized I, a non-Black person, was friends with the men and could vouch for them, did he start to back off. But he insulted them the same way he insulted Swift.

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1087565905037410305

Then they hassled Aaron Flournoy who was trying to catch up with Swift's crew.
la.streetsblog.org/2017/05/01/usc…

This was all at a PARADE. LAPD just walked into the middle of a parade on the one day of the year you'd expect them to leave Black ppl alone and started hassling people bc they could.

I don't know where that fits into the crowd control strategy playbook Moore speaks of.

What I do know is that if Garcetti doesn't stop talking about "peace" and start talking about justice in a real and meaningful way, we're not going to get anywhere.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe.