I remember this column. It was deeply troubling, but she wasn't alone in her verdict. Also troubling was the outsized attention and sentencing seen here b/c it happened on USC campus; shootings elsewhere around South L.A. were largely ignored. latimes.com/opinion/story/…
The case was also used to justify more aggressive policing of the community around USC in 2013... something which USC is only now finally beginning to re-examine, eight years later. la.streetsblog.org/2013/04/30/a-t…
I had, however, forgotten she had quoted the Murder Cop of all people. And that she had said things like "It would be naive to write this off as just a gang or ghetto problem." It's so much worse than I remember. latimes.com/local/la-me-04…
I'm genuinely glad she's revisited the column and her reasoning, but... whooo... the LAT has so much to atone for.
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I don't have an opinion on what CM Raman's vote should've been, but I do have some thoughts on the process itself that put her in the position of having to vote on something she did not support b/c she didn't have an alternative paradigm she could vote for instead. [Deep breath]
First - she was voting on whether or not to approve $9mil for the continuation of the Community Safety Partnership (CSP) program in housing developments. The renegotiation of that five-year MOA had been in the works for much of last year. (see doc below) hacla.org/Portals/0/Atta…
Moreover, Garcetti had not only reaffirmed his commitment to CSP last summer (below), he committed to institutionalizing CSP by bringing it into the heart of the dept. There is no alternative that the city has seriously contemplated that is not police-led.
Some important new details that raise questions about a) why it took a bunch of teens of privilege to raise the alarm about McNeil and b) why the NYT continues to think Ben Smith is the one who should be reporting on the intersection of race and media
It's not surprising that the guy who dedicated a column to why he wouldn't stop reading Andrew Sullivan despite the man's affinity for race science and his overt bigotry would write this, but it's still surprising that he has this job.
I wrote 250 pgs of my dissertation on this topic and finally walked away in frustration in 2011 b/c of how difficult it was to get this message across in a way my advisors saw as valid. nytimes.com/2021/02/13/opi…
I remember one prof I particularly don’t care for telling me that if I couldn’t reduce my argument to a linear diagram I didn’t have an argument.
Another, who I thought would be more sympathetic, dismissed me by asking if NGOs and int’l “emergencies” weren’t “very 1990s” and therefore out of fashion to study.
it's wild to me, too, because Ofcr. Deon Joseph chronicled just how low COVID laid him on twitter. there are folks within the dept. that understand how serious the disease is.
LASD recently participated in a SEB tactical medicine training with agencies from around the state. It was a ***medical*** training. The accompanying tweet w/ these photos said "Saving Lives Priority 1". They were proud til I called the masklessness out...
the very first public comment was a #notallwhitepeople statement from Steve Sann who wanted credit for white people helping elect Tom Bradley to mayor back in the day.
folks have *1 minute* to offer comment on how their communities are being impacted by complex historical processes. which meant that Tim Watkins was cut off while talking abt Watts' challenges while white westsiders are calling in to complain about being gentrified by tall bldgs.
a woman calling from Crenshaw was trying to explain some of the ways which folks are being pushed out of the area and was cut off midway through.
South L.A., this is starting now... they just asked listeners to guess how many uses of force there were last year like it was a quiz show. [I'm recording it and only tuning in and out while working on something else, but that caught my ear.]
Now they're quizzing listeners on how many times they used force when dealing with folks having some sort of mental health or nonviolent emergency (e.g. were inebriated).
I get what they're doing - trying to constrast folks' expectations of uses of force with the number of encounters they have and how many times force is actually used to suggest they practice great restraint.