yes, let's talk about policing finally.
We're not off to a great start by blaming a community that has been deliberately disenfranchised and repressively policed: "But long before COVID-19 we had a public health emergency in those neighborhoods of crime and death and violence."
He kind of fudges the history of the community safety partnership (CSP), which was born out of a lawsuit settlement from a case where HACLA failed to protect its tenants in housing developments from violence and intimidation. That case: caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-ap…
"We started in Jordan Downs."
Yes, because that's where the Zuniga family lived.
Yes, because that's where the Zuniga family lived.
It's important not to paint it as something the city did willingly. When I first looked at this years ago, I was told about the fights within city hall regarding the funding of this project ... our electeds didn't see the value of community-based policing.
And once it got up and running, there was a lot of resistance within the LAPD to see any value in community-based policing. If folks weren't being shaken down for drugs and guns or arrested, other rank-and-file disparaged CSP officers for not doing real police work.
Both Linton and Swift, featured here, were positively seen in Jordan Downs. I spent this summer hanging out at Summer Night Lights and watching this program get its footing and I saw people respond to them in a way they didn't respond to other officers. latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2…
But I heard about how uncomfortable roll call was for them after that article came out.
There were a number of officers - not all - in that first generation of CSP that were truly dedicated to the beat and saw it as the manifestation of why they got into policing - preventing harm and making the community safer.
Since then, it's become more of a vehicle for promotion for some. One of the pair of South Park CSP officers I met on patrol one day was really good to a young man I met there. The other tried to find every possible excuse to throw him back and jail.
So now I'm on a bit of a tangent, but it matters because many of those in favor of defunding police have not looked favorably on the CSP for a number of reasons. But the program has been a significant catalyst for change in many ways.
I remember a Watts CSP officer who was out of his mind with anger over how the LASD had not called them when some kids from Jordan Downs started exchanging words with youth from Nickerson Gardens while at Ted Watkins park.
LASD hs jurisdiction over Ted Watkins park. LAPD has jurisdiction around the surrounding streets. LASD let it build and finally just shooed the kids into the streets, hoping it would become LAPD's problem, but didn't let LAPD know.
One of the kids went home and picked up a gun. He ended up shooting three people, paralyzing one youth. But it didn't just impact those kids, it essentially ended the summer fun for all the development kids because they had to fear retaliation.
abc7.com/ted-watkins-me…
abc7.com/ted-watkins-me…
That shooting contributed to a summer that was already hot. But it felt like the last straw. Black youth vanished from the streets and the basketball court during Summer Night Lights. Summer fun was over for everyone.
The officer was upset both over the needless harm that had come to those injured and how it undid all the work they had done with regard to de-escalating tensions and engaging youth before they acted.
It would have been so easy to have prevented all of it, he ranted. But because LASD and LAPD don't play well together and LASD didn't have the same kind of commitment to the community, LASD couldn't be bothered. And now a kid was paralyzed.
One story does not tell the story of the program, of course. And of course as soon as kids stepped foot outside the developments they were harassed by the regular LAPD, as many youth complained to me at the time.
They still couldn't trust LAPD, in other words. They could just trust that one officer they knew. To them, that was a sign that nothing had really changed, even if they had appreciated having one or two folks they could call on.
And the fact that this was a police-led program instead of a more comprehensive program of social services or more real investment in gang intervention and intervention workers was something that came up again and again.
Anyways, I'll get back to the press conference now but some of that background matters. It was an imperfect solution no doubt, but it was deeply thought through at the time & the effort made to implement it by that first generation changed what LAPD thought policing could be.
I am regretting turning back to the press conf bc Garcetti is waxing on about the "co-ownership of public safety" & the need for cops to understand the experiences of the people they serve. It's his way of explicitly avoiding speaking to the institutionalized racism w/in LAPD.
I'm about an hour behind - I've gone back to the start to make sure I get it all. And Garcetti just said they need to "stay humble," which sounds like he might be trying to reference Kendrick? I don't know. But I would recommend he not do that.
But now I'm also chewing on "community-driven policing," knowing that many of the people he thinks he's speaking to would define that in a way that doesn't actually involve police.
He's so good at saying words but so bad at defining what they mean.
"Greater accountability and transparency" - what does that mean in practice, for example?
Right now LAPD is continuing to try to frame a shooting victim for an attempted murder, despite recently acknowledging they're the ones that shot the other victim.
Right now LAPD is continuing to try to frame a shooting victim for an attempted murder, despite recently acknowledging they're the ones that shot the other victim.
[Jermaine's story is here:]
Without having a reporter to put his story out there, how would he ever hold LAPD accountable? How would anyone know LAPD needed to be held accountable in that case? A gang interventionist I spoke to this morning said the sad thing was that Jermaine's story wasn't anything new.
Guys I'm only 10 minutes into this second listen and it's not any better than it was the first time around.
As I listen to Monica Rodríguez speak about the values embedded within the CSP and about the importance of officers earning trust, it seems as good a time as any to remind folks that Newton's CSP has Blue Lives Matter business cards. 
Marqueece Harris-Dawson is speaking about Harvard Park and the shift in some of the dynamics within the community there. He is emphasizing the importance of ppl in the community being able to believe that police in the community work on their behalf.
It's hard to overstate how often I've heard that from elders and caregivers in the community... they want to be able to call on police when they've been victimized and not have their grandchildren interrogated about their gang affiliations.
If I had any comment to make, it would be only that, that same level of relationship building is not happening with the youth and the gang members themselves.
Brims that used to hold community bbqs at a community space on Vermont and do clean-ups, for ex., didn't get the kind of nod/uplift that they should have because that model doesn't fit comfortably within police-based approach to safety.
Joe Buscaino is talking about the importance of a change of culture w/in the LAPD. But when I tried to talk to him about a young friend that is constantly profiled in Watts, he wouldn't acknowledge the actual "culture" that needs changing.
Curren Price is doing some of the same lionizing of the CSP by talking about how it has driven down crime and how actively CSP participates in community activities... all of which, again, is things older residents have long asked for.
But the gang youth are kind of the whole reason that the CSP came into being. Focusing so heavily on building relationships with people so they feel more comfortable calling the police on those youth isn't really a radical reimagining of public safety.
Emada Tingirides, who I first met six years ago in Watts and who did some really important work there, is talking about how important it is to not have police in the title of CSP. But it'd be nice if the gap between rhetoric and practice was a bit less gaping. Again:
*Capt. Tingirides is soon-to-be Deputy Chief and will be heading up the CSP Bureau.
Civil rights lawyer Connie Rice, an architect of the CSP in the wake of the Zuniga settlement, says we have ended a war on gangs and are instead waging "a war on the trauma and the violence and the conditions that people suffer in" and... that is a little not really true.
Rice and the Advancement Project put intense work into building an infrastructure in Watts (e.g. the Watts Gang Task Force), building relationships in the Latino community there, and attempting safe passages work. So much work went into that.
But it was literally a drop in the bucket. Wars are never good, but a true war on trauma would come in the form of real investment in youth, in the OGs that know what the youth have been through, and in building ladders of opportunity and healing.
In response to Claudia Peschiutta's question about resources, Garcetti clarifies this bureau will not require new resources - it will be created with existing resources.
Trying to parse out what this actually means, it sounds like making it a bureau centralizes it in a way that it currently has not been. Previously, you had to specifically apply for the program and go through additional training to participate.
As I noted above, that's one thing that made it feel like it kind of lost its footing along the way... it became a good thing to have community policing on your resume after Ferguson. So not everyone was as committed to the mission as many in that first generation were.
Garcetti says it being integrated this way means the values that define it will now be straight across the department. Which is essentially saying that LAPD has not valued relationship building until now, but I don't think he realizes that.
Anyways. This isn't specifically about CSP, but it was part of the backdrop of this story from seven years ago...then as now, folks really needed investment in youth, mental health services, healing, and opportunity. They're still waiting. la.streetsblog.org/2013/11/06/dea…
