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May 3, 2022. Los Angeles

Local police and the department of homeland security riot in response to non-violent action calling to recognize abortion as a human right.

People’s City Council on twitter

The city of LA robbed residents of $3,200,000,000 ($3.2 B) this year to fund LAPD, or 46% of the city’s discretionary funds.

The county of LA robbed residents of $3,500,000,000 ($3.5 B) this year to fund LASD.

DHS will receive a record breaking $76,299,000,000 ($76.3 B) this year, a 11% increase for DHS at the behest of the Biden administration.

DHS was formed in 2002 under the guise of anti-terrorism in response to 9/11.

On Monday the Los Angeles City Controller’s Office released their highly anticipated LAPD helicopter unit audit.

from https://lataco.com/

"A black American celebrating Kwanzaa is like an Irish Catholic waving the Union Jack and reciting a poem in Lithuanian. "

"Hotep Thanksgiving with a broken Menorah"

SHOCK REPORT: LA DA George Gascon's Newly Appointed Chief of Staff Tiffiny Blacknel, a FORMER LOOTER has consistently advocated for the abolishment of prisons and Defunding 'Barbaric' Police while DISMISSING 2020 RIOTS as Looting Incidents.. George Gascon, the District Attorney of Los Angeles known for his progressive stance, has elevated a self-declared looter to the Chief of Staff role in what is the nation's largest prosecutorial office. The announcement made on Friday by Gascon appoints Tiffiny Blacknell to this key position. Blacknell, who previously worked as a public defender, is outspoken in her support for defunding the police. She often describes LAPD officers as 'barbarians' and portrays them as an 'occupying army'.

'Defund the Police' LA City Council member asks LAPD for EXTRA patrols

'Defund the Police' LA City Council member asks LAPD for EXTRA patrols https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11712483/Defund-Police-LA-City-Council-member-asks-LAPD-EXTRA-patrols-council-office.html?ito=native_share_channel-home-preview

THE “SPIKE IN CRIME IS NOT NECESSARILY A SPIKE. IT IS LITERALLY THE CAUSE & EFFECT OF U.S. POLICING.

1.Millions & millions dollars of theft is happening through White collar embezzlement & corporate fraud NOT SHOPLIFTING yet the police DON’T go after White collar criminals.

2.Kyle Rittenhouse & Alec Baldwin are examples of how they treat Privileged White Murderers & r🅰️pists. And that include ignoring previous complaints about White mass murders & domestic terrorists.

3.Police don’t take the astronomical amount of missing Black & Brown Women & girls seriously.

4.They will pursue a Black inner city marijuana dealer harder than a White opioid dealer even though fentanyl overdose is the number one cause of death for Americans age 18 to 45.

5. Every 98 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States. One of the biggest barriers to justice for survivors is decades worth of untested rape kits.

6.Police DO NOT prevent domestic violence especially in BIPOC communities. A least four Black women and girls were murdered per day in the United States in 2020.

7. Not to mention that the courts are backlogged with criminal cases committed by police. 😐

👆🏽👆🏽👆🏽👆🏽👆🏽OUR LEGAL SYSTEM IS NOT CONCERNED W/ CRIME.

POLICE SUPPORTERS ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH PUBLIC SAFETY . THEY WANT TO MAINTAIN OUR CURRENT SYSTEM OF APARTHEID THAT HYPERMONITOR, CRIMINALIZE, TERRORIZE & MURDER POOR & MARGINALIZED BIPOC PEOPLE 👆🏽👆🏽👆🏽👆🏽

CRIME HAS NOT SPIKED. THE NYPD IS JUST SOLVING FEWER CASES. AND SINCE THEY HAVE TO OPTION TO MANIPULATE THE NUMBERS..... PADDING THE STATS ALLOW POLICE TO DO LESS WORK YET MAINTAIN (& INCREASE) THEIR EXORBITANT BUDGETS.

I mean, ok, but this just means the LAPD budget is going from $1.8 billion to $1.7 billion.

This shows that we cannot let up this fight.

Also, give the Mayor ZERO credit for this. This is ALL because of activists and protesters!

8.2.22. Los Angeles

LA City Council voted to criminalize sitting in public on 20% of LA’s land in an effort to strengthen police power and funnel more unhoused and Black and brown people into jails. Council members used police to clear the chamber of protesters, and nearly all people in the chamber, in order to pass the measure without protest.

[Image 1 shows a line of police officers with their backs turned to the city council bench, facing an empty council chamber minus one person sitting in a bench, possibly a journalist.]

Sneak peak of Angela Bassett in Season Four of 9-1-1

What is a “Police State”?

Over the past week the issues of police violence and institutional white supremacy, which have plagued America for years, are now being discussed in many arenas in which they have long been ignored. Ideas ranging from moderate reform to outright dismantling of police departments are being discussed in increasingly mainstream circles. In earlier days of social media I used to sometimes express my views that America was a police state. This was mostly during the Bush administration, and I feel the idea was generally dismissed as an exaggeration even though I meant it quite literally. I felt like I wasn't very good at talking about it and unfortunately, rather than get better, I mostly just stopped. I am trying to rectify that now. It is time to speak up and more frequently - in this post I'd like to try explain the issue a different way, using a local example:

I live in Los Angeles, California - a city and state broadly perceived as liberal or even (by American standards) "progressive", with a Democratic mayor, a Democratic city council (14 out of 15 seats), and a Democratic sheriff. At the same time, Los Angeles police department has a nationwide reputation for racism and brutality, largely dating back to the 1991 assault on Rodney King - a crime which similarly brought the issues of police violence and structural racism into mainstream discussions, in an unprecedented way.

Those discussions happened at the scale and level they did because the beating of Rodney King was caught on camera. At that time, video cameras were still relatively new and not a lot of people had them. In the thirty years since, the world has changed and now the average citizen has a camera in their pocket at all times. I cannot even count how many incidents of police brutality - from beatings to outright murder - have been captured and discussed at all levels of society in the thirty years since. In the past decade alone the frequent murders of Black citizens at the hands of police, and the brutality with which police respond to calls for justice for those murders, have frequently reappeared in mainstream news cycles, and even been acknowledged at multiple levels of government.

Take all of that into consideration when you consider the chart attached to this post (graphics below by Peoples Budget LA), which depicts the proposed Los Angeles city budget for the year 2021, thirty years after the assault on Rodney King, after hundreds of clearly and widely documented incidents have made it obvious just how violent and racist the police in this country are. The chart shows billions of dollars going to the LAPD while all other areas, from emergency management to housing to community investment, receive crumbs.

Not only is the overfunding of a violent racist police force a problem, but the underfunding of every other area of city life contributes to the conditions causing crime in the first place. Adequate funding of areas from mental healthcare to social work to housing would go far further towards combatting many of the issues we face in this country than overemphasis on law enforcement.

This is not an accident. The mayor and city council of Los Angeles have not been living under a rock for thirty years. They have seen the same videos we've seen, they are well aware of police brutality, and similarly they are well aware of the fact that underfunding areas from community services to housing contribute to crime. This is entirely on purpose - and the pattern you see here in Los Angeles is repeated all over the country. This is why all over the United States we see police forces armed to the teeth with expensive weapons and armor while basic infrastructure, schools, and housing are neglected, especially in marginalized communities. This is exactly what is meant by a police state: there is one primary beneficiary of the state, and it is increasingly militant police forces, propping up an increasingly nakedly racist power structure.

There is a tendency in liberal and even progressive circles to frame racism as a "Republican problem" and to focus on the current president. It isn't, not even remotely. Hopefully the example I'm showing you in this post can illustrate the point that simply "voting blue" is not remotely a solution to police brutality or structural racism, and that these problems are and have been severe all over America no matter which party is in charge, whether at municipal level or federal.

We are well past the point where reform is an option. The idea of law enforcement and "policing" need to be rethought and rebuilt from the ground up. Personally, I see the idea of "policing" as something that starts with the _self_ first, and then extends to one's own community, and with increasing patience and kindness as one goes further from the realm of one's own knowledge and experience - and I realize that's not a "realistic policy proposal", it's a mentality, a framework. In terms of real change, I think we need to push for the abolition of existing police forces and of the idea of a permanent police "identity" and push towards community oriented solutions that involve the participation of all, with a strong emphasis on deescalation and conflict resolution.

“Lessons About Police Brutality from the Chicanx Experience” by Joseph Orosco

Summary of Key Points

This essay provides a very brief summary of some notable incidents of police brutality and corruption from the Chicanx perspective. These include:

The Texas Rangers, who were specifically formed to patrol the Texas-Mexico border, were brutal. They abducted and murdered hundreds of Mexican-Americans from 1915-1919 during a period known as La Hora de Sangre.

In 1942, in an incident known as the Sleep Lagoon Murder, over a dozen  Mexican-American youth were arrested in connection with the death of a Chicano man. They were denied lawyers, were forced to appear in court in dirty clothes, and they were stereotyped as “violent” and “savage” by experts for the prosecution. They were taken away from their families and sent to reform school despite shaky evidence.

In 1951, in an incident known as Bloody Christmas, the LAPD arrested a group of young Mexican-American men. During a Christmas party, LAPD officers forced beat the men with clubs, resulting in severe injuries. Though initially covered up, families of the men joined up with Community Services Organization (CSO), a grassroots civil rights organization, to pressure the city. A review led to several convictions and many reassignments.

The Chicano Moratorium March was a nonviolent demonstration against the Vietnam War, in August 1970. 30,000 people showed up. When a nearby business was broken into, LAPD declared the entire assembly unlawful, attacked protestors with tear gas and other less-lethal weapons, injuring many and killing some, including a journalist.

These incidents reveal that police brutality and racism is not restricted to anti-Black racism.

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lmao this fucking country