John Heron Project

So when I was in LA last year, everyone was terrified of the police. They considered the LAPD to be a bunch of psychos. they warned me not to cross the road if the green man wasn’t showing - even if there was no traffic - because if the police saw me, they’d arrest me. Having grown up with the comforting idea of the provincial British bobby, I found it hard initially to understand why the LAPD were so scary.

I got the idea pretty quickly. To illustrate: a week before I arrived in LA last year, the LAPD ran down a joyrider and emptied their guns into the car. His name was Devin Brown and he was thirteen years old. He had ten bullets in him. That’s pretty extreme, really. It was very nearly like Rodney King all over again. In the end, it wasn’t, but it got a bit hairy.

Here’s an illustration from this week.

My mate Bob, who I stayed with in LA, is an activist. He’s way to the left of me, politically, and he’s unafraid to do all sorts of activist stuff. He does protests and stuff all the time (here’s me writing about going to one of his meetings). The group he’s part of, ANSWER-LA, are out there taking the streets, like, every week, it seems, and hell, why not? If it isn’t crazy immigration laws, it’s near-fascist militias. Or dimwitted Austrian-born actors running the state of California.

So anyway, the LAPD get some stick from ANSWER. They do. Not physical, just direct criticism. But then, you empty your guns into thirteen-year-old black kids, you deserve it. But the result is that the cops do not like ANSWER. When ANSWER go on a march, the LAPD make it hard for them. On the other hand, when the openly racist, violent and far-right anti-immigrant group the Minutemen (I’m not linking them, but Google “Minutemen LA” and they’re about the first result) go on the march and ANSWER stage a pavement protest in response, the LAPD pull out the big sticks.

Literally. Watch the YouTube video linked from Bob’s site. It beggars belief.

Those aren’t policemen. Those are thugs in uniforms.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 7:36 am and is filed under America, Links, Reviews and Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.