Editorial: Police Commission must stop stonewalling activists

To quell unruliness by activists at its weekly public meetings, the Los Angeles Police Commission last month adopted a set of rules intended to enforce civility. It didn’t work.

In fact, it backfired, sending a message that rather than tackle tough topics, the commission just wanted the activists to be quiet or go away. Instead, the unruliness continued. Now, it has gotten so bad that the Tuesday morning meetings are dragging on for hours, the proceedings frequently stopped while chanting or shouting audience members are removed. Those who remain have been lining up for their two minutes of public comment on every single agenda item, using even the most mundane subjects to press their arguments about police brutality and LAPD indifference. Last week, expecting a protest, police cordoned off the entire LAPD complex downtown, and access to the meeting was cut off after activists filled the modest-sized auditorium. It looked like a siege.

But no one in city government appears to be taking this bizarre situation very seriously. Officials, from Mayor Eric Garcetti to the members of the Police Commission, seem to view the chaos as the work of a small group of attention-seeking activists who will go away eventually on their own. That strategy hasn’t worked. Instead, because officials have ignored the legitimate concerns of the activists from well-established groups such as Black Lives Matter, the Youth Justice Coalition and Los Angeles Community Action Network, the weekly discourse has gotten uglier and the commission members have been left to deal with the fallout.

This can’t go on. Many of the things the activists are asking for are reasonable — greater transparency about the use of force by police officers, and especially about officer-involved shootings; a community forum to discuss police tactics in black communities; the appointment of a community activist to the Police Commission (which is mostly made up of well-connected campaign donors). Activists across the country have been asking for many of the same things in their own cities — ever since the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., 14 months ago by police put a spotlight on the alarming number of unarmed African American men killed by police.

In Los Angeles, it’s a topic that officials shouldn’t need prompting to talk about. Already this year there have been more officer-involved shootings than in all of the last year — 31 people shot and 17 people killed.

The breakdown at the meetings suggests that city leaders have misjudged the level of discontent. Perhaps they thought that after the commission found in June that the shooting of Ford by two officers last year was “out of policy,” and after the department rolled out body cameras for officers and launched de-escalation training, that the uproar would wane. But it hasn’t.

After Garcetti was caught in June slipping out the back of his residence at Getty House rather than speak to the Black Lives Matters protesters camped outside, he met with members of the group and promised a continuing dialogue, but that hasn’t happened yet. The mayor had also asked activists for suggestions about who should replace Paula Madison, whose term on the Police Commission ended in July. Activists suggested a well-known Watts community activist, but were not told when the mayor rejected the suggestion, or why.

The City Council has also remained mostly silent on the use of force by the LAPD. Chief Charlie Beck has also missed opportunities to assuage community concerns. He is adamant that body camera video won’t be regularly available to the public, and he has failed to even talk about the use of force during his weekly report to the commission of major incidents and crime statistics.

The mayor does deserve credit for appointing entertainment lawyer Matt Johnson as president of the commission to replace Madison. Johnson, who, like Madison, is African American, appears to have the right ideas about the importance of public input and a commitment to talking about the difficult topics of race and policing.

That’s good, but Johnson will need support from the city leaders. It’s not fair to put him and the other citizen police commissioners on the front lines of such an important issue without backup.

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