News
Protest Outside Mayor Garcetti’s House Ends With Unprovoked Police Violence, One Arrest
The LAPD continues to brutalize and attack protesters while disseminating misinformation to major media outlets.
On the 13th straight morning of protests outside The Getty House, LAPD riot officers ambushed the crowd, which included children, the elderly, and the disabled. A protest marshal and local elected official was arrested, deadnamed, charged, and released.
Activists with Black Lives Matter — Los Angeles and coalitional allies rallied outside Mayor Eric Garcetti’s house Sunday morning demanding that he not be appointed to any position in President-Elect Joe Biden’s administration. In what appeared to be a premeditated ambush, LAPD riot officers, some without masks on, descended on the protestors, beating several with batons and causing a pile-up of bodies on the ground.
Like the previous 12 mornings, a crowd of roughly 200 protestors marched up Irving Boulevard to the Getty House, then complied with police orders to stay off the roadway and on the sidewalk. Several children as young as two years old were in attendance with their caretakers.
Just before organizers were getting ready to set up a table for donuts and juice, dozens of riot police crossed onto the eastern sidewalk of Irving Boulevard and began beating protestors with batons. As seen in a video posted by People’s City Council, the attack was both sudden and unprovoked.
Lieutenant Figueroa can be heard telling his unit to “grab the turquoise shirt,” referring to Joseph Williams, an organizer with BLM-LA who has been leading the actions. That’s when Jamie Penn, an elected member of the Wilshire Center-Koreatown Neighborhood Council and organizer with DSA-LA, ran over to de-escalate.
“I saw someone fall on the ground, and they were elderly. At the time I didn’t realize it was Baba Akili [Akili is a veteran activist and organizer who has worked with BLM-LA for years]. I just ran over to help him off the ground. The next thing I know I’m getting shoved, I’m in a dog pile, and I’m in custody,” Penn said in a phone interview.
She has been marshaling nearly all of these protests, helping direct traffic, communicate with legal observers, and ensure protestors’ safety. Penn said her Miranda rights were never read to her, and she was repeatedly mocked by officers for her gender identity as a trans woman.
“They repeatedly deadnamed me. I was originally taken to a men’s facility and held in solitary confinement for 3 hours,” Penn said. When friends called the station to make sure she was taken to a women’s facility, officers derisively mocked the importance of respecting Penn’s gender identity.
According to a 2013 report by the Anti-Violence Project, trans people are 3.7 times more likely to experience police violence than cisgender victims. Trans people are seven times more likely to experience physical violence when interacting with the police. LAPD has a history of inflicting verbal, physical, and sexual abuse on trans women and gender nonconforming people. Most recently, LA Taco and the LA Times documented numerous instances of abuse during last summer’s protests.
After Penn was arrested, organizers scrambled to find out where she was being held and what she was being charged with. Officers were giving conflicting information and unprofessional attitudes to callers. While Penn was in custody, NBC Los Angeles published a story titled, “Protestor Arrested on Suspicion of ‘Lynching’ at Garcetti’s Residence.” The story was written by City News Service (CNS), a wire service that often publishes pro-police stories with no byline on local TV news outlets.
The article itself reads like a police press release. The only quote in the piece is from an LAPD Media Relations officer. It goes on to define “lynching” as “the crime of removing someone from the lawful custody of a peace officer by means of a riot,” citing California Penal Code 405a. That section of the penal code is not, in fact, known as “lynching.”
California legislators unanimously voted to strike the offensive term from the penal code in 2015 after the arrest of a black activist at a BLM protest. Holly Mitchell, now LA County Supervisor-Elect, wrote the bill.
This raised the question of why such a provocative, racially charged term was used by CNS and published by NBCLA in relation to an arrest made at a Black Lives Matter protest. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, CNS published their story directly from what they were told by LAPD, evidently unaware that “lynching” is not in the penal code, or that police are known to lie to shape narratives. This would explain why the story lacked quotes from any eyewitnesses or any of the videos of police violence circulating on social media at the time.
Furthermore, NBCLA credulously published the story without basic fact checking. As of this writing, their tweet about the story is still live. As I wrote for KNOCK.LA last week, local TV news frequently boosts pro-police narratives in its reporting of police violence at protests.
The process of police propaganda being laundered as news by local TV stations unfolded before Penn had even been released from custody, indicating that the events of the entire day may have been premeditated.
It’s easy to imagine the police deciding they were going to make arrests Sunday, knowing they were going to call the charges “lynching” at a Black Lives Matter event, and then passing the story to friendly, uncritical media outlets to disseminate via platforms where people would not read past the provocative headline. This would be used to discredit BLM-LA and its demands to block Mayor Garcetti from Biden’s administration. Garcetti, tired of sustained protests (and his own unforced errors) bringing national attention to his inept leadership as Mayor, would then sign off on all of the above.
This is a far more likely series of events than what the police and their allies at NBCLA put forth: that Jamie Penn — elected official, protest marshal, and mutual aid organizer — incited a riot, a claim easily refuted by the dozens of videos and eyewitness accounts from the scene.
As of this writing, several local elected officials have condemned the LAPD’s response, including US House Representative Jimmy Gomez, State Assembly members Miguel Santiago and Wendy Carrillo, and LA City Councilmember and Councilmember-Elect Mike Bonin and Nithya Raman. However, none explicitly called for Penn’s felony charges to be dropped. Mayor Garcetti and District Attorney George Gascon, who has recently promised to reopen several investigations into police killings, were notably silent.
On Sunday night, at least 100 unmasked right-wing protestors gathered directly in front of Mayor Garcetti’s house, demanding businesses reopen.
One report indicates that three officers were on scene and the crowd eventually dispersed, perhaps because of the cold. The ordinance that requires protestors to keep moving, which LAPD enforced Sunday morning, was not enforced Sunday night. No batons were used, and no arrests were made.
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