I was in the midst of publishing a blog about Los Angeles’ uncertain opening following the COVID-19 lock down that has been part of daily life in Los Angeles since March 15th. Yet the death of George Floyd and the resulting public outcry across the country for justice, the protests in many cities and the looting that has followed those protests cause me to change my mind on what I wanted to talk about.
The subject on everyone’s mind is the heinous murder of George Floyd that everyone in America has seen. While I know nothing of the city of Minneapolis or its police force or its racial history just watching a white man kneel on the neck of a black man for 12 minutes until he died tells me a lot. One of the other officers who was involved and fired is an Asian American. He is a person of color, yet he did nothing. It seems that the bond between police officers to back each other up outweighed their duty to protect the public at least in this case.
Los Angeles my home city is under curfew tonight. The entire city from Downtown Los Angeles all the way to Santa Monica is closed. The curfew started at 8:00 PM and will last until 5:30 AM on Sunday morning. There were fires at the Grove, a popular high-end shopping mal,l and looting and burning along famous shopping district of Melrose Ave. There were also reports of fires in Beverly Hills and in other parts of the city. When the curfew started at 8:00 PM and for the next 2 hours you could hear police sirens going off in all directions and for some unknown reason also a tremendous amount of fireworks.
What follows are two completely different views of what happened at a protest rally at Pan Pacific Park near the Grove and the historic Farmers Market on Fairfax Ave between Beverly and 3rd. This is an old historical area that is going through many changes and now it’s a very upscale shopping area. Today it was the scene of a clash between police and protesters that ended up in police cars being set on fire and certain buildings being looted or also set on fire. At one time the police shot rounds of rubber bullets into the crowd to make them disperse.
The first voice you’re going to hear is from Godfrey Santos Plata, a Democrat running for the California State Assembly, District 53 in the general election this coming November 3rd. He was at the protest at Pan Pacific Park to be there in support of the protesters who he claims were incredibly well organized and peaceful until the police showed up. In a series of tweets on his site @godfreyplata, he wanted to talk about a few things that the public was not being shown by the mainstream media about what really happened at Pan Pacific/Fairfax rally. First that multiple families of murdered black folks were present, and the leaders of the protest did a roll call. And that #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Patrice Cullors gave a rousing and moving speech that was in no way inciting the crowd to violence.
Also, Plata pointed out that there were multiple groups of volunteers who were passing out free water to the demonstrators, and folks were reminding other people to continue to wear their masks. He further remarked that most of the homeowners in that area are white and they came out to honk their horns or pump their fists and to show support for the demonstrators. There were many remarks online about the mayhem that was taking place in the intersection of Fairfax and 3rd where motorists seemed trapped in their cars. Plata states that the mayhem was actually demonstrators trying to direct the traffic where to go.
Finally it is Mr. Plata’s assertion that when the police began to shoot rubber bullets into the crowd, a cry went up from the demonstrators for all the white people in the group to come to the forefront to help protect the people of color behind them. And he says this actually happened. He goes on further to say that for all the anger and rage that the crowd was feeling, they basically had come there to support the other demonstrations that were going on in other cities and demand that killer cops be prosecuted and to defund the Los Angeles Police Department. In the Mayor’s newest budget, it has seen an extraordinary increase in the amount of funding that LAPD is to receive while the city is cutting back on housing and workforce development and education.
Again, this is all according to Mr. Plata who was running for political office In Los Angeles
Yet after four days of continuing violence and protests about George Floyd’s death, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti had reached his limit. He requested that Governor Gavin Newsom send in the National Guard to help LAPD which had repeated clashes with protesters as they pillaged businesses and torched police vehicles.
The Mayor was quoted as saying, “The California National Guard is being deployed to Los Angeles overnight to support our local response to maintain peace and safety on the streets of our city.” The mayor had ordered a rare citywide curfew until Sunday morning.
According to NBC Channel 4, referencing the same area that Mr. Plata was in as one of the hardest hit areas. The Grove which sits next to Pan Pacific Park is where hundreds of protesters swarmed the area and showered the police with rocks and other objects and vandalized stores. The mostly peaceful demonstration devolved when protesters set several Police Department cars on fire, broke store windows and climbed on top of a bus. Police used batons to move protesters back and shot rubber bullets to scatter the crowd.
The scale of the damage in Los Angeles has been compared to the 1992 Rodney King riots when over 1 billion dollars in property damage was done. Currently there’s no estimate about how many businesses have suffered damage during the protests but it’s clearly extensive.
On Friday night protesters rampaged through downtown late at night smashing windows and robbing jewelry and other stores and the police ended up arresting 533 people.
Mayor Garcetti initially imposed a curfew for downtown but then quickly expanded it to cover the entire city as the violence seemed to be expanding everywhere. The curfew is to last from 8:00 PM on Saturday night till 5:30 AM on Sunday morning.
NBC Channel Four also reported that a large group of demonstrators actually entered the city of Beverly Hills and held a protest on Rodeo Dr, one of the most famous shopping streets in the world. Channel 4 says they were mostly peaceful and as you can tell from the photograph of the Beverly Hills protest, it seems quiet and respectful. Yet, in spite of that, social media has posted lots of video posts showing marchers chanting ‘Eat the Rich’ while a crowd broke into the high-end stores and fled with merchandise
As in Minnesota where the governor has accused out of state right wing extremists as the cause for the looting and violence in Minneapolis, California’s governor said that authorities were closely monitoring organized violent extremist groups who may be trying to use the protests for their own agenda.
“When the violence escalates, no one wins,” Garcetti stated. “I’m asking all of Los Angeles to take a deep breath and to step back.”
Let us all hope we do!