Under lawyer Jackie Lacey’s term as corrupt
District Attorney of Los Angeles, there have been 600 thug cops charged with
crimes. ONLY ONE was prosecuted. You can’t separate the COP REIGN OF TERROR in
L.A. from this fucking lawyer! That’s why the neo-fascist cop unions of pumped
millions into her reelection campaign!
THIS BLOG HAS POSTED ON COP CRIMES FOR A DECADE. NOTHING HAS
CHANGED AND NOTHING IS LIKELY TO CHANGE. COPS, PROTECTED BY CORRUPT LAWYERS AND
NEO-FASCIST COP UNIONS, CONTINUE TO MURDER AND LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF’S AND
CITY COPS ARE SOME OF THE MOST MURDEROUS AND GANG INFESTED FORCES IN THE
NATION.
YOU CANNOT SEPARATE THE LAWLESSNESS OF THE COP AND LAWYER
CLASSES. JACKIE LACEY IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE LAWLESS LAWYER PROTECTING THE
LAWLESS COP CLASS. THERE IS A REASON WHY COP UNIONS, EVEN OUTSIDE JACKIE
LACEY’S DISTRICT, ARE PUMPING MONEY INTO HER CORRUPT CAMPAIGN. THEY KNOW SHE
WILL NOT PROSECUTED MURDERING COPS!
During her time
in the DA’s office, Lacey has prosecuted only one officer for killing a
civilian, leading to protests outside
her office and her home.
“She continues to find that it
is necessary for police to kill unarmed people,” Gascón said. “Perhaps she
thinks it’s fine, or perhaps it’s all the money she has taken from police
unions.” Lacey has benefitted from more than $5 million in contributions to
outside committees benefiting Lacey has come from law enforcement unions.
LOS ANGELES D.A. CANDIDATES SPAR ON POLICE SHOOTINGS, DEATH
PENALTY
Kira Lerner Oct 09, 2020
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LOS ANGELES D.A. CANDIDATES SPAR ON POLICE SHOOTINGS, DEATH
PENALTY
DA Jackie Lacey and challenger George Gascón outlined
diverging visions for the top prosecutor’s office in the nation’s most populous
county.
Los Angeles County District
Attorney Jackie Lacey and her opponent, former San Francisco District Attorney
George Gascón, laid out their diverging views for the
top prosecutor’s office in a debate Thursday, clashing on issues like the death
penalty, gang enhancements, and the prosecution of cops who shoot and kill
civilians.
Lacey, who has served as the
county’s district attorney since 2012, is facing a challenge
to her re-election bid by Gascón, a former assistant chief of the Los
Angeles Police Department and chief of police in San Francisco, who solidified
a reputation as a reformer as San Francisco DA.
During the debate, Gascón
called Lacey a “faithful steward of the past,” highlighting the reforms he
hopes to bring to the nation’s most populous county. Gascón has been vocal
about his intention to hold accountable police officers who shoot unarmed
civilians. During her time in the DA’s office, Lacey has prosecuted only one
officer for killing a civilian, leading to protests outside
her office and her home.
“She continues to find that it
is necessary for police to kill unarmed people,” Gascón said. “Perhaps she
thinks it’s fine, or perhaps it’s all the money she has taken from police
unions.” Lacey has benefitted from more than $5 million in contributions to
outside committees benefiting Lacey has come from law enforcement unions.
Activists have also criticized Gascón for not
bringing charges in any of the 49 police shootings that
occured during his time as San Francisco DA. He said that the standard for
unreasonable force set by California law made it too difficult to bring
charges. Last year, Gascón advocated for legislation to strengthen standards
for police use of force. Lawmakers ultimately adopted a weakened version of
the proposal. He said Thursday that he believed he would be able to bring
charges in the 2015 police shooting of Mario Woods if it came before
him today.
Lacey and Gascón also
disagreed on the death penalty. Lacey, who says she reserves the punishment for
select defendants convicted of the most violent offenses, has sent at least 23
people to death row during her tenure. Almost none of them were white.
She said she will use the punishment so long as it’s permissible by law.
“Until the voters tell me they
don’t want this penalty anymore, we’re going to continue to seek it, but seek
it in very rare cases,” she said. In 2016, Los Angeles County voters approved a ballot initiative to
abolish the death penalty, even as it failed statewide.
Gascón pointed to the racial disparities in the
use of the death penalty nationally, including the fact that Black defendants
are most likely to be sentenced to death if their victim is white. “The death
penalty has lost its utility a very long time ago,” he said.
The candidates also laid out
different visions of how they would prosecute cases, with Gascón calling for
changes that would reduce criminal convictions and very long sentences. They
sparred over gang enhancements, a tool that
is overwhelmingly used against people of color to
increase penalties for offenses associated with gang activities. Gascón said he
would stop using them, while Lacey said she would continue doing so.
Gang databases, which are
sometimes used to seek the sentencing enhancements, have come under fire for
being riddled with inaccuracies and
being very difficult to get names removed from. Lacey said she didn’t just rely
on databases, and that her prosecutors verified claims of gang involvement
independently.
The candidates also discussed
diversion programs. Lacey said she has prioritized mental health diversion and
would expand the practice if more secure facilities and programs were
available. Echoing the criticisms of defense
attorneys and criminal justice reform advocates, Gascón said only a small group
of people were able to benefit from her diversions.
Gascón framed
Lacey as a hardline prosecutor, while Lacey claimed Gascón was just a puppet of
wealthy donors who want to experiment with criminal justice reform in Los
Angeles. Toward the end of the debate, Lacey accused Gascón of texting with
progressive donors while they were speaking. Gascón, laughing it off, said he
was just taking notes on his phone.
Violent, secretive fascistic networks operating inside California
police stations
7 August 2020
A
whistleblower in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has exposed a
violent right-wing extremist gang operating within the Compton station known as
the “Executioners.”
The “Executioners” network, according to
a report on July 30 in the Los Angeles Times, is composed of
sworn law enforcement officers who all have matching tattoos featuring “a skull
with Nazi imagery” and an assault rifle. The gang “celebrates deputy shootings
and the induction of new members with ‘inking parties.’”
An
estimated 20 deputies are members of the “Executioners” network, most of whom
work at night. According to the whistleblower’s claim, which was submitted on
June 23 and more recently came to light, the “Executioners do not allow
African-American or female members.”
The tattoo of a Los Angeles police “Executioner”
Instead of using official police
channels, the gang members communicate with each other through WhatsApp.
“Members become inked as ‘Executioners’ after executing members
of the public,” the whistleblower complaint states with emphasis, “or otherwise
committing acts of violence in furtherance of the gang.”
According
to the whistleblower complaint, the gang “wields vast power at the Compton
station,” which covers an area of Los Angeles that is historically home to a
large proportion of working-class black residents.
The
whistleblower, deputy Thomas Banuelos, was targeted, threatened, and attacked
by a member of the Executioners. “It was a very serious, violent and bloody
assault which could have killed Deputy Banuelos,” the whistleblower’s attorney
Alan Romero reported. A member of the Executioners “had him on the ground and
was literally just bashing his head in with his elbow over and over and over
again.”
When
another deputy attempted to anonymously report the attack on Banuelos through
an internal tip line, his identity was exposed and turned over to the
Executioners, and he found graffiti scrawled on the keypad in front of the
station accusing him of being a “rat.”
“I
think the scariest thing,” Romero said, “is that he did what he was supposed to
do. He called the authorities, and they betrayed him. They turned him right
over to the gang. It’s a whistleblower’s worst nightmare.”
On the website WitnessLA,
an inside source identified the three deputies in this video as members of the Executioners
gang. On the video, which was published in June, the deputies savagely beat a
man who is pinned to the ground.
“We have a gang here that has grown to
the point where it dominates every aspect of life at the Compton station,”
Romero told the Los Angeles Times. “It essentially controls
scheduling, the distribution of informant tips, and assignments to deputies in
the station with preference shown to members of the gang as well as prospects.”
When
members of the right-wing extremist “Executioners” network do not get what they
want within the sheriff’s department, the gang members threaten “work slowdowns
— which involve ignoring or responding slowly to calls.” In addition, they set
illegal “arrest quotas.”
The
“Executioners” are only the latest subject of a string of exposures of
right-wing extremist gangs, networks, and cliques operating in California
police stations.
In L.A. County, Gangs Wear Badges
Much of the recent
debate about policing’s excesses involves a clash of two viewpoints: one
claiming that there is something structurally and culturally wrong with
American law enforcement that encourages immoral behavior, and another that
attributes their worst conduct to “bad apples,” rogue individuals whose actions
speak for them alone and do not indict their fellow officers or their
profession as a whole. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department provides a
helpful literalization of the former point: an entire law-enforcement entity
whose members regularly join criminal gangs, earn clout by harassing,
assaulting, and killing county residents, and retaliate against their
colleagues who dare to oppose them.
Sworn testimony made
in June by a whistleblower, Deputy Art Gonzalez, details a pattern of such
behavior inside the Compton sheriff’s station, which exists as part of the
Southern California city’s partnership with the county sheriff to provide local
law enforcement. Gonzalez claimed that Deputy Miguel Vega, who shot 18-year-old
Andres Guardado during a June incident that sparked protests, was a prospective
member of the Executioners, a dozen or so deputies who allegedly operate as a
gang — setting illegal arrest quotas, threatening work slowdowns if they don’t
get their desired shift assignments, assaulting their fellow deputies, and
holding parties to celebrate when their members shoot or kill someone in the
line of duty, the Los Angeles Times reports. The existence of the Executioners
is “common knowledge” within the department, Gonzalez said, according to
Spectrum News 1, which obtained a transcript of his testimony this week.
Decades of harassment and violence at the hands of the Compton office —
including one 2019 incident where the city’s mayor, Aja Brown, claims to have
been ordered out of her car by more than half a dozen deputies and searched for
drugs that she did not possess — have led the city to propose severing ties
with the department altogether, a proposal that the Executioners revelations
stand to accelerate. According to the whistleblower complaint, Deputy Vega, who
shot Guardado six times in the back, was “chasing ink” — a term used to
describe efforts to impress the Executioners in order to be drafted into their
ranks and obtain their signature tattoo: a skeleton backed by flames,
brandishing a rifle and wearing a Nazi-style helmet.
Part of what makes
this dynamic notable is how ordinary it is. Though the central allegation is
that the Executioners “dominate” the Compton sheriff’s office, at least nine
other such gangs are known to operate across the department, and have done so
for decades. “Vikings, Reapers, Regulators, Little Devils, Cowboys, 2000 Boys
and 3000 Boys, Jump Out Boys, and most recently the Banditos and the
Executioners,” Matthew Burson, chief of the department’s professional standard
division, told KABC last month of the LASD’s gang problem. “I am absolutely
sickened by the mere allegation of any deputy hiding behind their badges to
hurt anyone.” Sheriff Alex Villanueva has said he intends to fire or suspend
more than two dozen deputies involved in a widely covered assault on four
non-gang members at an off-duty party in 2018. Villanueva was elected under
immense pressure to clean up the department, whose former heads — Lee Baca and
his undersheriff, Paul Tanaka — were convicted of obstructing a federal probe
of abuses in the county’s jail. Tanaka was an alleged member of the Lynwood
Vikings, a white supremacist sheriff’s gang. Villanueva has also said that he
will implement measures to discourage deputies from joining these cliques at
all, but county Inspector General Max Huntsman said last month that he’d seen
no evidence of this actually happening. The fallout has been costly on several
fronts. Since 2010, misconduct claims linked to these sheriff’s gangs have cost
the county $21 million in settlements and associated legal costs, according to
the Los Angeles Times.
It’s hard to make
sense of this phenomenon without acknowledging that discrete individual
malfeasance is insufficient for explaining its scope and longevity. The
existence of ten or more gangs operating within the law-enforcement agency that
patrols America’s most populous county, and whose members have occupied its
highest ranks, indicates a level of tolerance and normalization that cannot be
isolated to any one person, and a scale of public danger that cannot be
calculated in mere dollar amounts or police shooting statistics. These gangs
have been implicated in sustaining an environment of terror, and are regularly
celebrated and rewarded for it. Their existence, and seeming intractability,
are stark manifestations of the ways that American law-enforcement agencies
operate as fraternities the nation over, with less regard for public
partnership than for capitalizing upon their own impunity. This is perhaps most
evident in the conduct of police unions. But survey any heavily patrolled
community and it becomes clear that the existence of police gangs are not
necessary to promote illegal arrest quotas, work slowdowns, or internal
plaudits for acts of brutality — though gangs are an especially brazen way of
formalizing them. This is simply the reality of policing.
It is also
incompatible with the arguments made by champions of “bad apple” theory — chief
among them President Trump, who this week equated killings by police to having
a bad golf game. “The police are under siege,” he said during a Monday
interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. He continued:
They can do 10,000
great acts — which is what they do — and one bad apple. Or, you know, a choker.
They choke. Shooting a guy in the back many times — I mean, couldn’t you have
done something different, couldn’t you have wrestled him, you know? I mean, in
the meantime, he might’ve been going for a weapon, there’s a whole big thing
there. But they choke. Just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot
put —
“You’re not comparing
it to golf,” Ingraham interrupted, denying what Trump was literally doing. “I’m
saying, people choke,” he replied. “People choke.”
Framed in this way —
which, despite its trivialization of homicide, is an apt distillation of what
is commonly being asserted when people argue that police abuse is aberrant and
discrete — the inadequacy of this explanation is made obvious. It’s also
cynical. Trump has pegged much of his reelection campaign’s success to a
performative support of the police, lying that his Democratic opponent, Joe
Biden, wants to defund them, and characterizing calls to rein in officer
misconduct as unduly prohibitive, even as he’s promoted better credentialing
and data-keeping practices. Officers have reveled in these lies and rewarded
him with their fealty. “New York’s finest I love,” he remarked on August 14,
accepting the endorsement of the Police Benevolent Association in New Jersey.
“And you’re the finest, they just don’t let you do your job. They won’t let you
do your job.” Thunderous applause greeted him. In fact, the NYPD — whose
members the PBA represents — have spent years subjecting Black and Latino New
Yorkers to a law-enforcement regime marked by routine violence and harassment,
such that the mere act of walking down the street was functionally
criminalized. Few professions enjoy such broad discretion and unaccountability.
Fewer still enjoy the benefit of having their deadly fecklessness waved off as
a bad round of golf. The particular incentive structure that governs gangs like
the Executioners may be eye-catching in its boldness. But it also typifies
policing in places where they do not proliferate so literally, where the apples
rot in bunches but are rarely deemed so bad they can’t be fed to the public.
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