"Shame on you!" was the protesters' chant at this point. It got worse.
Local journalist Amber Stephens has been on fire since Saturday night. Amber, late of the Daily Titan (and occasionally OJB) and now interning at OC Weekly, has been the go-to source for information on what is now four days and nights of “unrest” in the City of Anaheim — at and near the scene of the shooting at La Palma Ave. and Anna St., at the police station protest on Sunday, and now last night at Anaheim City Hall.
If you’ve heard of Twitter but never used it, this is the time to start. You can follow Amber’s reports in real time at https://twitter.com/amberjamie99pct, and send her twitter messages to @amberjamie99pct. For those of you who have thought that Twitter is all just self-indulgence and short-attention-span, this is an example of what it does at its best.
I don’t have the basis for my own reporting today, so I’m just recycling some highlights from Amber before I get to my own analysis. Here’s her summary posted from Twitter:
Although the day started out calmly with a group protesting near the street, protesters stormed Anaheim City Hall right before the City Council meeting was scheduled to start – many of them residents of the neighborhoods affected by the two police killings this weekend. Riot police emerged from the City Hall, where 25 officers lined up in the front pushing back protesters. After leaving City Hall, teenagers from those neighborhoods started to gather in the streets. More than 50 riot police from 10 OC cities showed up. Later on in the night, well over 100 police were on the scene with beanbag rounds and pepperball guns used to disperse crowds. Many bystanders have reported being hit. About a half dozen small fires were lit in the city.
The big event from last night was the conflict between police and protesters at Anaheim City Hall. She links to this video, which she took yesterday:
Many viewers will probably find parts of that video alienating. I wince whenever I’m at a rally and hear people chanting “fuck the police,” because policing is a necessary part of government. But policing should be done fairly and well — and that does not seem to be the case right now in Anaheim. Furthermore, it seems that — like the “secret bombings of Cambodia” that were kept a secret from Americans but obviously not from the Cambodians who were being bombed — Anaheim police have gotten away with a lot over the past few years because it hasn’t been on video.
But now the rest of us are in on the secret; we’ve seen one shooting and its aftermath through the eyes of the police. (No wonder they allegedly wanted to buy up the video.) Society’s understandable desire to reduce criminal behavior by gangs, and the delegation of responsibility for accomplishing it to police, has led to police militarization and to treating residents like an occupied enemy population. How do you expect people to act, now that they’re on camera and have our attention?
The fact is that the police were probably entirely justified in keeping people out of an already full (as I understand it) Council chamber. The underlying fact, though, is that police actions have led to an environment where protesters will be loud and rude. As JFK said, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” And so here we are — with the knot binding police and protesters pulled so tight that it will be hard to unravel.
One thing that Amber is doing right is to put the above raucous and rebellious protest in context. This is not the beginnings of the Anaheim protest; this is just their hitting a boiling point. She provides history of the most recent round of police conflict with the community going back to the killing of Caeser Cruz in 2009. Cruz’s mother, Theresa Smith, has been a leader of weekly protests in front of the Anaheim Police Station, of which this past Sunday’s was an especially large instance.
One thing that comes through Amber’s tweets is the breadth of OC law enforcement response from last night. Police were present from far and wide. Criminals from Garden Grove, Brea, Huntington Beach, Orange, Fullerton, Cypress, Placentia, Seal Beach, and Los Alamitos may be happy to notice that there are fewer police around their home towns– or if more police are on overtime due to this diversion of forces, the residents of these cities will notice it in their tax bills. (Oh, one day’s overtime won’t make a lot of difference — but we could be in for months of unrest in Anaheim.) If you live in Orange County, at least north and west of Irvine, then Anaheim’s problem is your problem too.
It’s also your problem — and Disney Inc.’s problem — because Anaheim has now been “marked” as a site of violent conflict between police and protesters. That doesn’t go away. When clashes like this happened in Oakland, they stayed at a boiling level for months. A major injury to an innocent protester, like the shell that Scott Olsen took to the head in Oakland, could lead to a much bigger eruption, with people heading to Anaheim from all over, just as those from the Bay Area who wanted direct conflict with police headed to Oakland. Anaheim — not the North Anna Drive part of it, but other parts — is a tourist destination. The fact that the shooting and conflict took place nowhere near Disneyland may be lost on potential tourists, who may come to think that Disneyland is located in the middle of an environment like Somalia. The police may try to crack down harder as a result — and that is very likely not to work. It’s not like they’ve been wearing kid gloves for the past 40 months, after all. Anaheim’s reputation may hang in the balance.
As much as I’ve argued that Occupy has to stay non-violent because otherwise we would slip into a category with which the cops were comfortable — the category of “violent resistance” into which the government has strained to place us — it’s hard to make that argument to the residents of Anna Drive who believe that they’re being suppressed by a racist and oppressive occupation force. Some Occupiers are there, but this is no longer an Occupy event. The poor and working class people of Anaheim, many of whom may not know or care about Wall Street corruption and Citizens United, are running the show now.
If the leaders of the City of Anaheim have any sense, they will look to community leaders such as LULAC President Benny Diaz to help broker a temporary peace and mutual understanding of the bounds of lawful protest in the weeks ahead. They will bring people like Theresa Smith — people who have built up credibility — into the process. Julio Perez might have been the kind of person who, were he a public official, could have helped to broker peace — but I don’t think that Tom Daly and Jose Solorio will be all that helpful. And, again, the notion that the response to this problem will be constructed by a City Council that is 80% from Anaheim Hills does not give one much confidence.
(Note: as I’ve noted, this is in my district, though of course I’m not an elected official. I don’t want to politicize the event, but in the unlikely event that someone determined that I could be helpful to any necessary discussions, I’d want to help — as I’m sure would most readers of this blog. I hope that my opponent, the incumbent, would do the same.)
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There was also a development in Fullerton’s saga that began last July, the Kelly Thomas killing. The phone call from an employee of the Slidebar that called police out to what became that fatal encounter has been released. We’ve already known for a while that a call took place and that it accused Kelly Thomas of lifting handles on car doors, presumably to try to gain entry, a claim for which I know of no corroborating evidence. The speculation now is: did the woman who made the call actually think that she saw it happen, did she suspect that this sort of claim would be likely to get police to come out more quickly — or had she been instructed, directly or through an intermediary, that if she ever wanted homeless transients removed from the area, these were the magic words that she could say to get it to happen. A lot rides on the answer, including the question of whether Officers Ramos and Wolfe could have been acting in good faith in suspecting that Thomas was actually committing a crime. (None of this, I have to add, excuses Jay Cicinelli’s excessive use of force that likely led or contributed to Thomas’s death.)
Even Amber Lyons of CNN came down to join the festivities. She marched right by me with a dozen cops Aiming the rubber bullet rifles at the heads ( i assume they were the rubber bullet rifles because they were being fired at folks.) So Los Dos Ambers keeping it current for Anaheim.
*Mayor Tom Tait ……we can be proud of in this mess. He has stood tall and immediately called for a State Investigation in the the shootings. Not much more that City Government can do at this point.
If people want to break business windows and beat on cop cars….they are probably going directly to jail.
Anyway, the right and wrong the the initial incident needs a full vetting and everyone involved from the top to bottom need to give the investigators some real answers.
The Anaheim Police Chief is standing tall as well. As unbiased observers we can simply say……luckily Anaheim is NO Fullerton! Lessons learned perhaps from Fullerton, but it seems apparent Anaheim “is trying” to answer the call.
We will continue along with the rest to stay alert to the resolutions provided.
Anaheim PD needs to have a zero tolorence policy on behavior such as last night’s. The more these punks get away with the more they will attempt. Chaos like yesterday’s deserved a response like Tlatelolco 68 (not that it would ever happen). It wasn’t justified in 68 that was a peaceful protest of people who suffered true oppression something last night’s participants have no idea about.
And what level of tolerance should we have for excessive use of force by the police?
I have argued loud and long against violence and property destruction in rallies because (as we can see today) it plays right into the hands of police and repressive interests. I hope that cooler heads will prevail. But let’s acknowledge that we reap what we sow.
The people of the poorer areas of Anaheim rightly perceive that the rest of us have ignored their issues for too long — and we would have ignored this one too were it not for a luckily preserved video that a TV station chose to err. So your calling for a “Mexico City ’68”-style slaughter — in response to the bad manners of protesters, some limited (though inexcusable) property damage, and resistance to police based on reports I’ve seen has only led to injury to protesters and not police — is reprehensible. No wonder you stay anonymous.
Regardless of what you’d like to see, let’s bear in mind that the sort of response you envision could well kill Anaheim as a tourist destination, so I hope that cooler heads on your side of the issue prevail as well. Everyone can lose here if we’re not careful.
It could (and should) be argued that the people of the poorer areas have ignored the issues of the rest of the cities for years.
This is a two way street. Until the residents of these neighborhoods “take back” thier streets, we can debate all we want. It will never change.
Among the biggest business on Anna Drive is the black market dealing of WIC funds. $60. in government food credit gets you $20. in gasoline, at $4.00 pergallon thats not much. But thats the reality. When the Mom’s and Dad’s stop the cycle of go nowhere kids, and refuse to let thier children be known as “STOMPER” things will change.
I watched this first hand on Minter street, it changed, when the neighborhood changed. Not when 1,000 people marched. It looks good and makes people feel good about themselves, but come Christmas………..Anna Drive will be Anna Drive.
So your message is “you’re on your own”?
Is part of your message also “please note that the police reserve the right to engage in summary executions”?
Greg, for a smart guy, you can sometimes be a little daft. What nameless is trying to say is that people need to take responsibility for themselves, their families and their communities. The change begins with them. Until that happens nothing else will.
I find that argument most often to be a dodge. People are not able to take responsibility for their communities largely due to factors for which you and I and others outside of their communities do collectively have responsibility: an infusion of guns into their communities, the benefit of trafficking in illegal drugs being heightened by their illegality and the “risk premium” thereby imposed, lousy public education, rousting by cops, etc.
The simple truth is that those of us on the outside don’t want to solve the problems of such communities so long as we can be insulated from their effects. Your assertion that this is a simple matter of low character on the part of others is an act of “washing ones hands of the problem”; the problem at hand is that this is one of the few cases where riots in a given city actually can bring it down by destroying its tourist business.
So, will you “take responsibility” for your community of OC? Or is your being able to blame the problems on the poor and angry good enough for you? In most cities, your be able to get away with your “let them all go to hell if they can’t take care of their problems” diffidence; Anaheim just happens to be one of the exceptions to that rule.
Of course, since you don’t believe that excessive use of police force even exists, you make your task extremely easy for yourself. What if it does, though, and the residents of these communities are showing good old American resistance to repression? Consider that possibility for a moment, if you dare — how would it affect your analysis?
No and No.
I personally don’t think we have a problem of excessive force by the police.
More than ever I think police officers have a very difficult and thankless job.
What I do think we have a problem with is a generation asking, “What have you done for me lately?”. It’s all about instant gratification. The youths at yesterday’s demonstration are the same ones that don’t have respect for their parents, teachers, bosses or anyone of authority. They demand respect but haven’t learned the lesson that to have respect you have to earn it.
Wish you had been there yesterday to “argue long and hard against violence and property destruction”. Unfortunately I think it would’ve fallen on deaf ears. The rogue crowd I’m convinced was determined to wreak havoc and create nothing but chaos. The officers were spit on, had rocks and dirt thrown on them and were hit with sticks. Police cars were kicked and pounded on as they drove by. The protesters behaved like this because they know that there are no consequences for their behavior.
The students in 68 suffered from true oppression (one that yesterday’s crowd can’t even imagine) yet their protest was a peaceful one. I truly believe that yesterday’s mob was intent on destruction and were only steps away from doing serious bodily harm to the police officers. For that there do need to be serious consequences and the officers would have been justified in defending themselves. You and I both know that what happened in Tlateloco would never happen here. But I do firmly believe that Law Enforcement should have a zero tolerance policy. I also believe that now more than ever Is when we need to support our officers.
I wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing there yesterday with the local guys; they look at me and they see another Anglo man whom they don’t know.
Please don’t give me the “they have no respect for others” line in a country where one party is about to nominate Mitt Romney for President. If they have no respect for those on which they would be predatory, they seem to have been well-socialized by their “betters.” If you’re talking instead about the people who came in from LA or wherever to get a chance to fight the police with relative impunity; what I can do is point out that their path didn’t lead us in the direction we wanted. And they’ll reply “neither does yours” — and, depending on what happens next, they may well be right.
Do you “support your officers” if what happened on Saturday was what it seems to have looked like: an extrajudicial summary execution?
To paraphrase the author: That depends on who “WE” is.
*Facts Ma’m….just the facts. All of them of course!
“The speculation now is: did the woman who made the call actually think that she saw it happen, did she suspect that this sort of claim would be likely to get police to come out more quickly — or had she been instructed, directly or through an intermediary, that if she ever wanted homeless transients removed from the area, these were the magic words that she could say to get it to happen. A lot rides on the answer, including the question of whether Officers Ramos and Wolfe could have been acting in good faith in suspecting that Thomas was actually committing a crime. ”
Speculation? Speculation by whom? Judging by the off-center conspiracy freaks who showed up at last night’s Council meeting, whoever this woman is, she’s right to be afraid. We can “speculate”: ad infinitum about ay number of causes. And its almost impossible to prove a non-event. How exactly can she prove she didn’t make a bogus call? And for that mater, why would she have to? What about all the other people who’ve called about Kelly and other “undesirables” in the past?
What Ramos et al did to Kelly Thomas was reprehensible and vile. But exactly how long do the people running this show intend to go on looking for new targets to accuse or new unfounded accusations to toss at those they don’t like? When do we start questioning their motivations?
Your question about people who have “called about Kelly and other undesirables” is well-taken. I’d like to know more about that too. And while I’m not going to defend conspiracy freaks or argue that this woman doesn’t have justifiable fear of reprisal, I don’t want to lose track of why this information is important.
Let’s assume that Kelly wasn’t really lifting car door handles and was just offensive to the business community because he was scraggly and shirtless. One scenario is that Ramos had no idea that the report was false and came onto the scene believing that Kelly was trying to break into cars. In that case, much of Ramos’s behavior (and certainly Wolfe’s, but not Cicinelli’s) becomes explainable and justifiable: he thought that he had a perp who was being cheeky with him and he was trying to cow him into submission. But in that case, the person who knowingly filed a false complaint to police (or who caused it to be filed) committed a crime that led to a death. That’s worth investigation, don’t you think?
A second scenario is that there has been a quiet understanding between police and the downtown businesses that they can’t just go and clear out the homeless, but that they can clear out the homeless if they are accused of crimes, so that if a business owner really wants someone gone all they have to do is accuse them of a crime and the cops will come and move the person out. In that event, a conspiracy between cops and businesses to violate people’s constitutional rights is what led to Kelly’s death. And one question that then arises is whether Ramos or Wolfe knew that the call was probably bogus but treated Kelly like a possible perp anyway. This is the way that possibly leads to a conviction for Ramos and/or charges for Wolfe.
I think that we need to know the truth, whatever it is. Why do you disagree?
Greg—I don’t disagree with you per se. What I’m leery about is the blanket assumption there is some kind of conspiracy afoot. I think if the local businesses really had some kind of deal with the PD, credible people would have exposed it by now, given the intense scrutiny on this case. I’m sure many of the people who protested the Thomas killing are area residents or business owners, or are closely associated with them, so any of them would certainly have exposed some kind of “agreement” between bar owners and the police. The atmosphere is now so poisoned that even if it could be proven there was no “secret code words” to get the PD to respond, the conspiracy freaks would claim there was a conspiracy about denying that as well. I can’t prove space aliens didn’t break into my house last night while I slept, and steal a lock of my hair so they can clone me, either. Given the history of complaints about the two defendants, I don’t think the type of call or the words used would make a big difference anyway. And even if such a conspiracy existed, nobody forced Ramos or the others to honor it. They chose to do what they did and they are responsible for what happened. And let’s not forget there are a fair number of parties who have a political stake in kepeing things stirred up. Synthesizing conspiracy theories just shifts the responsibility from them and detracts from the real tragedy of this killing.
I think the broader discussion should be about what we as a society ask cops to do as our surrogates. As you mentioned in an earlier post, most of us want people like Kelly Thomas and the “types” who live in the North Anna kept away from us. And there are all sorts of tools for us to accomplish that goal; economic discrimination that shunts people into over-crowded housing, an insane war on drugs, and, when all else fails, we expect the police to use force to keep them in their place. A lot of bloggers here and on the news media sites think people like Stomper got what he deserved. Others blame the police. How many of us are willing to deal with our own complicity in the situation?
It’s not an “assumption” — and for all I know any such arrangement could have been made specifically and solely with Slidebar. I’m also not introducing the possibility here for the first time; it’s been widely discussed.
I appreciate your thoughtful last paragraph.
Has Gustavo chimed in with “Klanaheim” yet?
Wow — you led me to a Google search with an interesting result: his 2009 article “In Defense of Klanaheim,” http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2009/05/in_defense_of_klanaheim.php, which may explain why he got so heated up about my post smacking him around for silliness regarding the ACLU lawsuit. I’ll only reproduce the concluding paragraph.
So — yes and no?
I would go rile up those Angry mob types to go after you Greg for being so insulting to Gustavo. However, most of them probably do not know who he is.
Insulting? Go read comments to posts at OC Weekly for context, starting with Vern’s tweaking Moxley and Gustavo over their devotion to Righeimer — and los chicos con piel de cebolla went stark loco.
I have no reason to think that Gustavo disavows the piece I link to above; he (rightly) mentioned the Citrus War again this week. I’d like to think, though, that he may be giving another thought to the benefits of ward-based elections.
Heck, half of them do not even know what “Occupy” is. “something to do with that mustache guy”
Why dosen’t the community get this outraged when a gangbanger shoots a gangbanger or they shoot an innoncent person. It seems like the comunity only gets upsent when it concern Law wnforcement but dosen’t care when Gangbangers do the shooting and sell dope in the community.
The key words in your comment are “it seems.” What have you done to develop any sense of what people in the community think or care, or how outraged they get, when youth kill each other?
What’s different about this, as they realize, is the added danger of people killing others under the color of law.
Ok show when the commuinity get upset when a gangbanger shoots another gangbanger or a innoncent bystander. Its like your saying the community dosen’t care when it gangbanger shooting another gangbanger they only care when Law enforcement is involved.
sta18 good points talking with diamond is like your talking to a wall . your lucky his respond back to you was not 35 pages .. samething in black population gang bangers kill each other zzzzzzzzzzzzz a white guy kills a black out comes racist al , jesse , and maxine i have a wig on watters .
Do you talk to walls a lot, Grater?
Did you ever notice that with Grater the Hater you get all caps or none whatsoever ? No middle ground.
Sta 18 veteran – you are good one…….and we agree. Did you read Gustavo’s article in the OC Weekly? We suppose “the real issues” involve who is really in charge of the hood. Odd, that both guys had SA addresses…..just dropping back into the hood to say hi? Who knows? Times have changed….as Gustavo points out……you might want to even read between the lines.
We are betting that SA has the same issues. We are betting there are probably three or more other communities that are facing the same things. 10 years ago the last Sheriff said there were over 260 gangs in the OC. We sadly doubt that the numbers have gone down…maybe some Mergers and Aquisitions, maybe some Off Shoring…Maybe a bunch of things. Did you see the 5 Ton Marijuana bust on TV today down at the dock of San Pedro? Pure happenstance…no doubt.