An elaborate re-creation of the fatal police shooting of 13-year-old Devin Brown, staged on a vacant lot in Granada Hills by the LAPD with help from Hollywood experts, casts doubts on a central justification for the shooting: that the officer was standing in the path of the teenager’s oncoming car when he opened fire.
A few weeks back, Suzie Marie Peña, 19 months old, was shot and killed by LAPD as she was being held by her father during a shoot-out. Seems like there could have been any number of ways to end the confrontation without killing a baby. The list of LAPD shootings just goes on and on; trigger happy cops, Black and Brown victims. The pattern is unmistakable – and ugly.
An Op-Ed in the L.A. Times attacks the ANSWER Coalition (of which I am a member) for daring to say that police can be racist and murderous.
The ANSWER Coalition – a collection of anti-war, anti-capitalist activists – argues that the officers who shot Suzie Peña must stand trial for “murder.” They characterize the tragedy as an act “of racist brutality against the people of Los Angeles.” Is it any wonder that the LAPD has struggled to keep morale up among its officers? Did any of the activists bashing the LAPD know or acknowledge that in more than 38 years and 4,000 incidents involving the LAPD’s SWAT team, Suzie is the first hostage lost to police gunfire?
I’m not sure I would use 4000 incidents in 38 years (almost one incident every three days) as proof that LAPD is not trigger happy. Quite the contrary, it would seem to indicate that’s precisely what they are. And one innocent dead hostage is one too many.