Lucille Kring says she’s not sure if more Latino Representation in Anaheim is Good!

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Lovato with San Roman

Journalist Roberto Lovato tours Disneyland Resort (entrance) with native informant Gabriel San Roman.

The video below, part of Los Angeles-based journalist/interviewer Roberto Lovato’s series Américans, is about Anaheim’s problems with coming to grips with its emerging Latino majority.  (It came out in late July and only has 201 views — so let’s send it through the roof!)  Featuring an interview with Gabriel San Roman (who, like his patron Gustavo, cleans up his act well the more people are watching), it focuses largely on the police shooting deaths of July 2012 and the few years leading up to that, and the political activism that was born out of those tragedies.  For some reason, we can’t embed the video itself, but you can go see it on YouTube at this link.

What I want to call your attention to is what happens in the 70 or so seconds starting at the 6:08 mark.  It should start there automatically, but if it doesn’t just skip ahead to there.

Lovato begins a 70-second or so interview with Councilwoman and Mayoral candidate Lucille Kring.  It’s remarkable — and I’m (mostly) not referring to the blistering dye job she had apparently just received in what may be a desperate attempt to confuse voters into thinking that she is Gail Eastman (because right now even she doesn’t want to go blonde and risk being mistaken for Kris Murray.)  Kring starts by dismissing the concerns of City Council candidate Donna Acevedo over police misconduct in Anaheim’s Latino communities — and then it gets really bad.

Here, in honor of the good people of Ferguson, Missouri, I have transcribed our local trainwreck for you.

Lovato (voice over): Lucille Kring is one of four Republican council members in Anaheim and may be the City’s news Mayor.

Kring: I disagree.  I mean I — she comes to Council a lot, she’s planning on running for Council, and just — I’ve never had a one-on-one conversation with her, I wasn’t here when her son was shot, and, uh, I just don’t think that the Police Department is racist.  What I saw is the police doing their job.  I mean, not everyone who gets shot is an angel, so….

What Council Member “Saves us the cost of a trial” may not understand, either willfully or through lack of capacity, is that there are two very different versions of what happened that night — and the version that the police tell doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Earlier in the interview, San Roman does a good job of setting forth the discrepancy of accounts — there’s good reason to think that the gun was planted — to which Kring is apparently blind.  Then, amazingly, the interview gets worse:

Lovato: So how many people are Latino on the City Council?

Kring (first taking a deep breath):  Currently, there are none.

Lovato: None.  And what if that continues because of, uhmm, at-large elections?

Kring:  Well, we’ve had four Hispanics elected to City Council in the numbers of years since the ’90s, and that’s out of 157 years.

Lovato:  Isn’t that a good thing, that Latinos would have more power — representation concomitant with their numbers?

Kring:  Well, uh, I don’t think so.

After saying that, Kring looks at Lovato like this:

Kring - I Don't Think So

“Take THAT, Hispanic Man!”

And Lovato, being the composed and trained journalist that he is, somehow manages not to react in the way that you or I might, which would go something like this:

Lovato, eyes popping out

“Why — the HECK you say, Madam!”

OK, that’s just some levity to lighten the moment, because the problems with minorities lacking representation in proportion to their numbers have been a pretty big national issue lately, with the focus on the attempts of the police in a St. Louis suburb to suppress what they seem to believe is an impending slave revolt, and that’s just something that you never want to hear or say or even think.

Lucille Kring should just withdraw from the race — it would save us the cost of a ritual humiliation.


About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)