Really, you have to start out with the cops.
Because police officers in their interactions with a ginned-up crowd are the most identifiable players in the game. Might as well have targets on their backs, and fronts. The uniforms. The big fade haircuts. Made them vulnerable during the recent days-long demos in downtown Los Angeles, when everyone was a bit angry, bit worn out, bit hangry.
Vulnerable except for, you know, the horses, the guns, rubber bullets, foam grenades, bullet-bullets. Levels the old playing field.
Anyway, you don’t like to see the big guys get hurt, and you like to see the crooks and creeps taken down. The good news today about the essentially bad news that is social media is the evil clowns who make it easy to get caught when they post on Facebook that they threw an incendiary device and a granite boulder at CHP cars.
Which is just what apparent evil clown Adam Palermo did, and he’s now in the slammer facing two felony counts of assault on a police officer. He’s one of about 30 people who new District Attorney Nathan Hochman is charging for assault-on-officer crimes coming out of the anti-ICE immigration raids protests in L.A.
But after the proper concern for our Boys and Girls in Blue, you do have to wonder as well what prompted them to shoot so many journalists for the apparent crime of having mikes and pencils in their hands. It’s so funny when I bring this up and some of our more, um, sensitive readers throw a hissy fit. Like the guy who wrote me last week: “Too bad you were not among the press to get shot with rubber bullets.” Too bad! Or the big newspaper fan who charged that gun-shot journos are just “reporters getting bloody noses” who act “as if they had been storming Omaha Beach.”
Are peeps jealous that the press is once again a dangerously glamorous profession? Something like that.
Anyway, when I briefly mentioned last week the Australian TV journalist shot by officers downtown last week I hadn’t seen the video and somehow imagined that she was perhaps the accidental victim of a stray projectile. Uh, no. You checked that out? Lauren Tomasi is live-reporting the chaos when the footage clearly shows an officer raising his rifle, aiming it directly at her and then firing it, hitting her with one of those rubber bullets square in the upper leg, on purpose. Knowing she is a working journalist, carrying a massive microphone covered by a big blue wind cover as your first clue. Knowing that the camera trained on her is also on him and would record what he is doing.
What is such a blatant shooting of a journalist under the cover of authority supposed to be saying?
This is what the Los Angeles Press Club is properly asking in its newly filed federal lawsuit against the LAPD. After noting the department’s long history of violent attacks on the press, the specific complaint this time around begins with Tomasi: “She was standing in a largely empty intersection, not engaged in any unlawful conduct or near anyone who was engaged in such conduct. The video of the shooting shows the LAPD officer looking directly at her and aiming specifically at her without the slightest justification. She held a microphone; she was accompanied by a camera crew. None of that mattered to the LAPD officers.”
And the suit goes on to enumerate the many other journos shot and unlawfully detained for doing their jobs. “With today’s lawsuit, the L.A. Press Club is fighting for the rights of all of its nearly 1,000 members to report the news without risking their health and safety,” said Adam Rose, press rights chair of LAPC, a nonprofit organization that supports journalists in Southern California.
As a newspaper reader, perhaps even of the kind who doesn’t want their scribes shot by cops any more than they want their bank tellers or baristas to be so rudely treated, you may well agree with this legal action.
You may hope, as do we, that one of these days a Los Angeles police force is created, through training and leadership, all of whose members are good enough at their jobs that they can watch a reporter from Down Under file a story on what’s happening and not want to shoot her in the butt.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].
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