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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:
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:
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.
I think you’re beating a dead horse.
I think that a lot of Anaheim Latinos will be voting on Tuesday — and they should hear how the Pringle Ring candidate, ally of the two Council candidates that Jordan Brandman just endorsed, feels about their need for Council representation.
Anyway, the horse ain’t over ’til it’s over.
A dead pintsized PACKMULE unburdened by conscience or scruple, you mean.
Wow??!! You should direct a question directly to Scott Baugh asking if that is the official GOP stance: Latinos not having equal representation on the dais is better for them?
Baugh and the GOP have already distanced themselves from Kring and her fellow travelers. She does NOT have their endorsement.
Bloviator: Spare us your false praise. Gabriel and I only speak the truth at all times, and don’t get duped again and again like your bloviating self and the Verntiloquist. Speaking of: How’s Lucille nowadays? And Jordan the Dem?
Who is the ventriloquist?
I’m busy writing about the upcoming election these days, Señor Piel de Cebolla, so I am unable to engage you in proper chest-thumping repartee until after it has ended and I’ve had the chance to hire a wrangler for your engorged, pulsating, yet somehow fragile ego during the bout.
I don’t recall supporting anyone in the 2012 Anaheim City Council race, actually. As a DPOC Committee member, I wasn’t allowed to support anyone except Brandman — and I couldn’t support Brandman either. So we’ll add that to the honking pile of instances when you only thought that you were speaking the truth.
Now go away until Wednesday — unless you have something to say that adds to the discussion rather than praise of your own personal glory, such as it is.
If you have not read their take on the latest fatal gang shooting in Anaheim, this is their most interesting statement: “California’s Byzantine sentencing laws and a lenient court let the cholos escape jail time despite violating the law and their probation again and again, a Weekly investigation has found.”
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2014/10/ximena_meza_9_nine_killed_shot_anaheim_gang.php