Pastor Urges a Positive Fight for Justice

The pastor of the church that will hold the funeral for a boy killed by police said Sunday that Devin Brown was “murdered in cold blood.” But the Rev. Lewis E. Logan II urged churchgoers to channel their anger and join in a constructive fight for justice.

Logan, the senior pastor at Bethel AME Church in South Los Angeles, made his comments during an emotional 11 a.m. service. The church is on South Western Avenue, three blocks from the site of the Feb. 6 police shooting of the 13-year-old boy.

The front of the church also was the site of an impassioned street protest last week. On Sunday morning, Logan praised the community for not resorting to violence.

“They expected your outrage to break out like wildfire,” he said. “But you channeled it, and you honed it.”

Officer Steve Garcia, a 9-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, shot Devin after a short car chase that ended when the boy drove a stolen car up on a curb, then backed it toward a police cruiser, according to LAPD accounts.

Since then, Bethel AME Church has become the home base for a coalition seeking to change a police department that they believe is racially insensitive and too quick to resort to deadly force.

Logan urged church members to add their names to sign-up sheets at the back of the church for committees that were organizing the proper response to the shooting.

With God’s help, he said, a concerted effort “will bring triumph out of tragedy.... This may just be the time when change may come.”

The service was full of references to the shooting. At one point the congregation read from 2 Corinthians: “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken.”

February is Black History Month, and Logan, like a number of other church members, was dressed in old work clothes in honor of enslaved ancestors.

His sermon reached across history, weaving references to Genesis and Jim Crow, former Alabama Gov. George Wallace and rapper Snoop Dogg.

He reminded churchgoers that not all police officers were bad. He also said that children had no business being out at 4 a.m., when the shooting occurred. And he said that he hoped the incident could help bring about a renaissance of community in South Los Angeles, where elders would look after young people and police would have less to worry about on the streets.

If African Americans could “change the way we treat each other,” he said, “nobody will dare come into our neighborhood and use excessive force on our babies ever again.”

Logan said prayer was key to changing the neighborhood and relations with the police. But so was a plan that would show the city such shootings were unacceptable, he said.

Some black leaders had hinted at that plan Tuesday, saying they might organize an economic boycott or file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city over perceived police injustices.

Logan said it was too early to talk about any specific plans. Instead, he exhorted churchgoers to attend a meeting at the church Tuesday night and to take part in a protest march Feb. 26, when city officials will sponsor public forums on the shooting at fire stations throughout the city.

Visitation for Devin is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. today at the House of Winston Mortuary, 9501 S. Vermont Ave. His casket also will be open at Bethel on Tuesday from 10 a.m. until the funeral at 1 p.m., mortuary officials said. Devin will be buried in Inglewood.

After Sunday’s service, landscaper Hulofton Robinson, 53, signed up to take part on a subcommittee that would focus on “political agitation.”

Robinson said he moved to Los Angeles from Mississippi in the 1960s, and longed for the days when the neighborhood felt more cohesive. Today, he said, the community still needs good police officers to help bring that feeling back.

“But this situation could have been handled a lot more professionally than it was,” he said.