Los Angeles law enforcement officers have killed 600 predominantly black and Hispanic citizens since 2000, averaging a person a week, finds a hard-hitting report by the Los Angeles Youth Justice Coalition.As Huffington Post reports:
The report, titled “Don’t Shoot to Kill,” examines homicide data from the Los Angeles County coroner’s department and incorporates details from numerous media reports on specific incidents. Between Jan. 1, 2000 and August 31, 2014, the report found, law enforcement officers in Los Angeles County used lethal force resulting in the deaths of at least 589 people. That’s almost one death a week, for nearly 14 years.
The report comes after a six week period in which LAPD officers shot and killed an unarmed black man named Ezell Ford, and allegedly beat Omar Abrego to death.
While communities protest the deaths, the report provides some chilling context to the eye-watering rate of death-by-cop in LA County.
While the overall trend of homicide since 2007 was downward, law enforcement use of deadly force resulting in homicide “doubled to between 4 and 8 percent” of the total — and there are clear indications of racial bias. Of the 314 people killed between 2007 and 2014, 82 percent were black or Hispanic.
What is concerning is that the deaths are not dispersed evenly across LA’s 57 different law enforcement agencies; rather, there are clearly marked killing zones.
“Many departments had no killings” during the 14-year period examined in the report, said Kim McGill, an organizer with the YJC.”We do know that, by far, the highest numbers [of police killings] are [committed by] county sheriffs and LAPD, with Long Beach and Inglewood leading among smaller cities,”
The report makes clear and detailed recommendations for remedying this untenable state of affairs, including:
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a civil rights investigation into officer-involved shootings and the use of force countywide.
The demilitarization of the police through the elimination of surplus military equipment,
The end of stop-and-frisk searches, gang databases and gang injunctions.
The report concludes:
Demand a city, a state and a nation where Ezell Ford and Deandre Brunston, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, Suzie Peña, and Devin Brown would be in college and not in the ground.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/09...on-every-week/