LA City Council asks LAPD to relax and treat riot gear as a last resort
I guess the cost of the lawsuits has finally caught the city’s attention.
Los Angeles city leaders voted to instruct the LAPD that protests are not a war zone. Rolling out the tactical cosplay does not need to be the department’s response to a peaceful protest. The City Council approved new limits on how officers can deploy and encouraged a “graded response” similar to New York and Boston.
LAPD’s love of excessive force at protests is well known. The department has repeatedly shown that it views public assembly less as a constitutional right and more as an opportunity to try out less-than-lethal weapons. Escalation and cowing the crowd with overwhelming force is the norm. Show up in full battle kit, communicate hostility, and just wait for that tension to spike. It is a loop that the department knows how to create.
Activists have come to expect this behavior. The LAPD appears to believe overwhelming force is a good time. The City Council is telling them to change, but there are no teeth behind it. The same department that treats the press as targets and crowds as enemies is being trusted to self-regulate its love of cracking heads.
I guess the cost of the lawsuits has finally caught the city’s attention.
via LA Taco
For far too long (c1970) police departments have been allowed, indeed encouraged, to siphon their typically generous budgets, not for hiring, not for training, but purchasing (often second hand) military gear [1] (there was a bugs_bunny cartoon where the hats that blew onto the characters heads affected their behavior... [2])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police
[2] https://looneytunes.fandom.com/wiki/Bugs%27_Bonnets