[News] Hundreds dead, no one charged: the uphill battle against Los Angeles police killings
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Fri Aug 24 17:37:20 EDT 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/24/los-angeles-police-violence-shootings-african-american?CMP=share_btn_fb
Hundreds dead, no one charged: the uphill battle against Los Angeles
police killings
Sam Levin - August 24, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Catherine Walker closed her eyes, pressed her hands over her ears, and
tried to escape.
It’s been four months since Los Angeles
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/los-angeles> police killed her son,
Grechario Mack, whose death barely made headlines, who did not become a
viral hashtag. On a recent afternoon, the 59-year-old mother wore pins
with her son’s face and said she was ready to speak. But when the moment
came, she could hardly talk.
As relatives recounted the killing around her, she tried to shut out the
words describing Mack’s last moments. Eventually, she collapsed in her
chair in anguish.
“I couldn’t save my baby,” she cried as someone held her. “When they
took my son’s life, they took a part of me.”
Police shot Mack, a 30-year-old father of two, in the middle of a mall
on the afternoon of 10 April, as he was holding a kitchen knife and
having a mental health crisis. Less than 24 hours later, officers
arrived at a park and killed Kenneth Ross Jr, another black resident who
struggled with mental illness and was said to be fleeing when police
shot him with a military-style rifle.
The two families, brought together by Black Lives Matter the day of
Ross’s death, are now channeling their grief into a fight for justice –
taking on one of the country’s deadliest police systems, where law
enforcement killings of black mentally ill residents are so normalized,
families struggle to be heard. They face an uphill battle in the most
secretive state in the US for police misconduct, in a region where
officers who shoot are never prosecuted.
“Mentally, I can’t even do nothing right now,” said Fouzia Almarou,
Ross’s mother. “But I’m gonna stay strong … I want to make sure my son
is remembered.”
‘Police don’t have to care’
Police in America kill more people in days
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries>
than other countries do in years, and Los Angeles law enforcement has
repeatedly led the US with its body count
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-map-us-police-killings>,
according to The Counted, a Guardian US project that tracked deaths
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/31/the-counted-police-killings-2015-young-black-men>
at the hands of law enforcement
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/31/ties-that-bind-conflicts-of-interest-police-killings>.
From 2010 to 2014, police in LA county shot 375 people, about one
person every five days. Black residents make up 9% of the population,
but represented 24% of deaths
<https://www.npr.org/2015/11/10/455502419/in-los-angeles-piecing-together-the-numbers-on-police-shootings>.
Across the US, the odds are stacked against families who look to courts
for justice. Charges are extremely rare
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/08/the-counted-police-killings-2016-young-black-men>
and convictions even rarer
<http://graphics.latimes.com/officer-involved/>, with the law widely
protecting officers who claim they feared for their lives. In LA, the
odds of prosecution are effectively zero.
Since 2000, there have been no charges for the more than 1,500 shootings
by police
<https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/01/10/79649/la-county-had-78-police-shootings-in-2017/>
in the county. Since the district attorney Jackie Lacey was elected in
2012, roughly 400 people have been killed by on-duty officers or died in
custody, according to Black Lives Matter LA. Lacey even declined to file
charges when the chief of the LA police department (LAPD) called for the
prosecution
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-police/los-angeles-prosecutors-decline-to-charge-police-officer-in-deadly-2015-shooting-idUSKCN1GK38A>
of one of his own officers.
“It really greenlights this type of behavior,” said Melina Abdullah, a
BLM organizer in LA. “Police don’t have to care about anybody’s life,
especially if they’re black or brown or poor.”
Abdullah and other activists are part of the Justice Teams Network
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/01/police-violence-black-lives-matter-justice-teams-network>,
which provides “rapid response” after killings. They go to the scenes,
interview witnesses, offer the family assistance with press and
funerals, and work to counter the police narratives.
On a recent afternoon, Abdullah took the Guardian to sites of police
killings in south LA. One stop was a quiet alley where three years
earlier, LAPD officers had killed Redel Jones, a 30-year-old woman who
had a kitchen knife and was fleeing police.
Jones, who had struggled on and off with homelessness, loved web design,
dancing, cartoon shows, electronic music and rap and had a “brain that
was always moving”, said Marcus Vaughn, Jones’s husband, recounting
their dream of traveling in a mobile home together.
Headlines
<https://abc7.com/news/armed-woman-shot-by-police-in-crenshaw-district/925223/>,
however, reduced her to a “suspect” wanted for a robbery. And two years
later, Lacey, the prosecutor, reduced her case to a statistic, clearing
the policeman with her standard finding of “lawful self-defense”. The
district attorney’s office declined an interview request.
“They did not care about Redel. Her death was one less black person. How
are you just gonna kill a woman like she just meant nothing?” said
Vaughn, adding that Jones was less than five feet tall and had bipolar
disorder and depression, but was not violent. “If she was a short little
white woman, they would’ve treated her with so much tenderness.”
Abdullah said she felt an obligation to organize after each killing and
a sense of relief when a day passed without a death. Standing near the
site of Jones’s killing, she was pained to see a makeshift altar had
disappeared and vowed to rebuild it.
Jones didn’t get justice, Abdullah said, but she is hoping her next
cases could be different.
‘Your aim was to murder my child’
When Quintus Moore saw a TV report saying LAPD officers had shot someone
inside the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw mall, he said he felt sad a man had
died for no good reason. Later, it dawned on him that he hadn’t heard
from his son since the day before.
After a series of frantic messages to each other, a visit to the mall
and a call with the morgue, the family discovered that their worst fears
were true: Grechario Mack was the victim.
It was supposed to be a celebratory month for Mack. He had been released
from prison on 5 April, five days before the killing, and the family had
gathered for a “welcome home” party. Mack had had mental health
struggles and past run-ins with the law, and, according to his parents,
he was on new medication that was negatively affecting him.
Moore said his son had seemed agitated the morning of his death, and
that he might have been paranoid or anxious and holding the knife to
feel safe.
The LAPD’s report said Mack appeared to be having a “mental health
crisis” and was “aggressively waving a long knife”. Police alleged he
ignored commands and “ran in the direction” of patrons, leading to the
shooting. Two officers fired at him, according to one report.
Abdullah, the BLM organizer, rushed to the mall, located in a black
neighborhood and just a few blocks from Redel Jones’s killing. She said
mall employees told her that Mack had been talking to himself and seemed
unwell, but was not attacking anyone.
One employee of a nearby store, who declined to give her name, told the
Guardian she walked within 10ft of Mack, who did not scare her: “He was
just standing there … It wasn’t such a big knife.”
Blurry videos <https://twitter.com/jeffnguyen/status/983909776852533249>
from witnesses captured
<https://twitter.com/MarcusSmithKTLA/status/983886171674632193> heavily
armed officers surrounding Mack and firing a handful of loud shots.
Screams echoed throughout the mall as shoppers ducked for cover and ran.
When investigators arrived, he was surrounded by shattered glass.
The county’s autopsy said Mack suffered at least five gunshot wounds,
including one in his back just below his head.
“It’s like they got some kind of mandate to kill our black young men,”
said Moore, who wears his son’s ashes in a pendant around his neck.
Mack’s mother compared the killing to a lynching: “They only went from
the noose to the gun … Who gives them the right to be the executioner
and the judge?”
Abdullah helped Mack’s family organize a vigil. There, she met Fouzia
Almarou, who had more bad news: police had just shot and killed her son,
Kenneth Ross, in a park 10 miles south of the mall, one day after Mack’s
killing.
Police have provided few details about the killing in the LA suburb of
Gardena. Lt Steve Prendergast told the Guardian that officers were
responding to calls of shots fired and ended up chasing Ross, 25, whom
they considered a suspect and was “running away from the scene”.
Prendergast said there was a “gun found at the scene”, but he couldn’t
say whether Ross owned it or had pointed it. One police report said Ross
briefly hid in a bathroom and that police shot him with an AR-15 rifle
after he exited. That report said the gun had been in his pocket.
The county’s official autopsy said he was shot multiple times, including
in the back.
Almarou said her son, who leaves behind seven younger siblings and a
four-year-old son, had bipolar disorder and schizophreniabut was well
known to local residents as harmless.
“Why did they shoot him in the back?” she said. “Your aim was to murder
my child.”
At the vigil, Almarou ended up finding somecomfort from Mack’s family,
who later donated money to Ross’s funeral.
‘We can’t treat mental illness with murder’
California is considered the strictest state in the US
<http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-me-california-police-discipline-secret-20180815-story.html>
for police confidentiality, with policies that have kept misconduct
records hidden
<http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-police-misconduct-secrecy-federal-20180810-htmlstory.html>
and, critics say, created a culture that condones excessive force.
“It allows the most abusive officers to continue to operate,” said
George Galvis, executive director of Communities United for Restorative
Youth Justice, which co-sponsored legislation
<http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-lb-803-46437-la-pol-ca-police-records-bill-advances-20180816-htmlstory.html>
to increase transparency. Another bill
<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/california-police-killed-162-people-ab931-bill-lethal-force-1/>
would stipulate that police could only use deadly force when
“necessary”, instead of the current “reasonable” standard. The move, he
said, would encourage police to treat people of color the way they often
respond to white suspects – de-escalate the situation and work to keep
them alive.
LAPD has adopted policies
<http://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-lapd-use-of-force-20180605-story.html>
meant to encourage police to defuse tense situations, but critics say
the reforms aren’t working and aren’t enough.
“We can’t treat mental illness with murder,” said Tabatha Jones Jolivet,
another BLM organizer.
Amid calls for prosecution and legislation, it can be hard for families
to keep the spotlight on their loved ones’ lives when their story
becomes their death.
Mack, known as Chario, was an honor roll student who graduated high
school early, his mother said. He loved to fish and was fiercely
protective of family. His nine-year-old daughter wrote a tribute saying
she would miss piggyback rides and museum trips, adding: “I know that
you’re always in my heart.”
Arianna Moore, Mack’s sister, said her brother motivated her to be
courageous: “He would tell me, ‘You could do anything you put your mind
to.’”
Vaughn, Redel Jones’s husband, said he and their children sometimes
struggled to remember what her voice sounded like. His nine-year-old
daughter often wakes in the middle of the night shaking after a
nightmare watching her mother die. She fears the police.
Ross, an avid skateboarder, was so generous, his mother recalled, that
as a child he gave his allowance money to homeless people: “His heart
was amazing.”
Ross’s mother said she was a survivor of domestic violence and that her
son took care of her.
When times were tough, she said, her son offered the same message of
comfort: “You’ll always have me to take care of you.”
--
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