While City Council members and the Los Angeles Police Department's top brass tried to assure some 300 mostly angry Angelenos May 14 that officers' actions on May 1 in MacArthur Park will be thoroughly investigated, individual after individual rose to assail LAPD tactics and questioned whether the department could investigate itself.
"I'm hoping that the community can speak to this issue of how do we begin the healing process," said Councilmember Ed Reyes, co-chair of the City Council's special task force on the park protests, during a May 14 meeting at Charles W. White Elementary School. "We want to be able to share information with the inspector general [of the Police Commission], so we can begin rebuilding the confidence that the men and women in blue of Rampart Division worked so hard to maintain over the years.
"With your help and, hopefully, with your input, we begin this task of establishing that confidence. But it's just as crucial to fill a void that we don't want the bad guys to fill - the gangbangers, the vultures, the folks who are pushing drugs on our kids," he added. "These are the folks that we need essentially to protect our families from."
Councilmember Jack Weiss, the task force's other co-chair, said the working class and immigrant neighborhood around MacArthur Park needs and deserves the very best it can get from the LAPD. But this involved a "two-way street" in community trust and partnership.
"Hopefully, by airing the issues out now, by hearing from the inspector general and the chief of police while the investigations are pending, we will feel more of a confidence in what those investigations finally find out."
Inspector General Andre Birotte said "first and foremost" he was looking to see if police abided by policies and training procedures they were required to follow. Noting that he wasn't a cop and reported only to the independent Police Commission (made up of five civilians appointed by the mayor), the former prosecutor and public defender declared, "Our job is simple: find out the facts, come up with analysis and recommendations, and call it like it is."
Both LAPD Chief William Bratton and Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell also promised that the May 1 melee would be thoroughly studied by three internal investigations, including an "after-action" report, internal affairs study to evaluated allegations of misconduct by officers and a counter-terrorism examination to determine if agitators where connected to any organized anarchist faction.
"We're committed totally to transparency on this," McDonnell said.
But dozens of people who rose to speak in the question-and-answer part of the two-and-a-half-hour meeting in the school auditorium weren't persuaded. Through an interpreter, an emotional Josefina Gonzalez reported that she had been hit "very, very strong" by a police officer with his baton across her face. The mother of three children said she still felt "great panic" from being beaten. She knew her body would heal, but didn't think the emotional hurt would ever leave her.
"Most of all, I would like to ask Chief Bratton where the order [to attack marchers] came from," Gonzalez said, facing the LAPD leader sitting at a side table away from Councilmembers Wendy Greuel, Jose Huizar and Jan Perry, along with Reyes and Weiss. "Because more than anything else, in my opinion, this was an act of racism."
Her lawyer Luis Carrillo, who said he represents about 20 victims of the MacArthur Park rally, called for a full federal investigation of the incident and for an independent counsel review of the city attorney's office, which he said often "covers up" for police officers involved in civil litigation. He also asked the city to recommend to the Police Commission and mayor that Chief Bratton not be given a second term of five years.
"When the police marched on innocent people [in the soccer field], there were no agitators," Carrillo noted to loud applause and cheers. "That has to be absolutely clear. That's a smoke screen some want us to believe that there were agitators. No, there were only peaceful people.
"What we had there was a total failure of command and control," he stressed. "A total failure of lack of supervision and training of police officers."
Los Angeles Unified teacher Alejandro Garcia pointed out that he was mandated by the State of California to inculcate in his nine-year-old students a respect for government and law enforcement. But on May 2, when they asked, "Why did the police act that way?" he didn't have an answer for them.
"Chief Bratton, one of my brightest, most energetic, most caring students who all year long told me how she dreamed of becoming a police officer to 'get the bad guys,' looked absolutely crestfallen," Garcia said. "And when I asked her, 'What's wrong?' she said, 'I don't want to be a cop if I have to hit moms and children.'
"I hope and expect that part of this [investigation] process defines the answers to my student's question," he added, "so we're assured that this type of police reaction doesn't happen again."
Four more community meetings are being planned to address the volatile MacArthur Park police abuse issue. |