Protest Jams Traffic Downtown

Downtown afternoon and evening commuter traffic was snarled to a standstill Friday as demonstrators staged a noisy march to Los Angeles Police Department headquarters to protest killings by police officers.

After reaching the LAPD’s Parker Center building, the approximately 500 demonstrators loudly applauded speeches by relatives of people slain by police and addresses by the leaders of several groups participating in what they called the Fourth National Day of Protest.

“We want justice. Otherwise, they are going to go on killing innocent people,” said Erika Lopez, 20, the sister of Michael Shinaia, who she said was shot to death by police in Bell Gardens in 1997.

“We’re fed up! We’re fed up!” the demonstrators shouted as about two dozen uniformed LAPD officers watched silently from behind a strip of yellow police tape stretched along the sidewalk at Los Angeles Street in front of Parker Center.

Many of the demonstrators wore black T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Stop police brutality.”

Several organizing groups, among them the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Revolutionary Worker newspaper, set up tables from which they distributed pamphlets and other materials.

Despite the clamor, the crowd remained orderly, and the greatest disruption was to Friday night commuter traffic.

Police blocked off various streets as the march, which began shortly after 2 p.m., progressed slowly through the downtown area from Olympic Boulevard and Broadway to the Civic Center police building.

As the demonstrators assembled for the speeches in the middle of Los Angeles Street, between 1st and Temple streets, officers blocked off all three roadways for several hours.

The result was a monumental traffic jam. Vehicles on downtown thoroughfares, already clogged by a major repaving project on Broadway, ground to a halt, with little letup by sundown.