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John Raphling, a senior researcher on the criminal legal system at Human Rights Watch, discusses the effects that the Black Lives Matter Movement and George Gascon's election are having on criminal justice in Los Angeles...

Every Wednesday afternoon for years, Black Lives Matter activists and their partners chanted a simple demand outside the Los Angeles County Hall of Justice: Jackie Lacey Must Go! Elected in 2012, District Attorney Lacey presided over the largest prosecutorial office in the United States. These protests and the frustrations that fueled them helped propel George Gascons election as District Attorney in November.

The most prominent complaint about Lacey was her failure to prosecute police officers, even though they killed hundreds of people under her jurisdiction. Among them was Brendon Glenn, an unarmed Black man, shot twice in the back by an LAPD officer. Citing the surveillance video that captured Glenns May 2015 killing, then-Police Chief Charlie Beck and the Police Commission recommended prosecuting the officer. Lacey delayed a decision, then in March 2018 declined to file charges.

Beyond failing to hold police accountable, Lacey, choosing to use a variety of excessively harsh sentencing laws, maintained high incarceration rates in Los Angeles County, primarily affecting Black and Latino communities. These laws included sentencing enhancements with little deterrent effect, rules allowing children to be tried as adults, and the notorious Three Strikes law. Los Angeles County, under her leadership, has also been among the nations leaders in death sentences.

The Black Lives Matter protests revealed widespread discontent with Laceys punitive policies toward the community and her protectiveness toward police. They grew from a few dozen people to thousands demonstrating this summer as the police killing of George Floyd focused the nations attention on racial injustice in the criminal legal system. Former San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon capitalized on that discontent to challenge Lacey, openly campaigning as a reformer who would reverse policies that historically increased incarceration. Los Angeles voters decisively approved his candidacy, despite opposition from police and their unions.

Understanding the debt he owes to progressive organizers who opposed Lacey, Gascon immediately initiated his agenda to reduce the punishment state and hold law enforcement accountable. Gascon is reconsidering Laceys decisions not to file charges in killings by police officers, including the case of Brendon Glenn. It remains to be seen if he will take meaningful action to limit police impunity, but reviewing these cases is a necessary first step.

Gascon will not seek death in any case and will not try children in adult courts. His policy states that he will no longer pursue sentencing enhancements that add prison time based on allegations of gang association. He will no longer pursue other enhancements based on prior offenses, including five-year enhancements and Three Strikes enhancements. He has ordered his deputies to withdraw enhancements in previously filed cases.

These policy changes will most likely have substantial impact. Sentencing enhancements make the consequences of cases so extreme that accused people quickly plead guilty regardless of actual guilt for fear of lengthy sentences if they contest the charges. Lengthy sentences contribute to prison over-crowding and punish people out of proportion to the crime. People serving these extreme sentences languish in prison long after they are no longer at risk of future crime, warehoused with no hope for the future. Gascons policies will begin to limit that harm.

He announced policies limiting prosecutions of misdemeanor cases related to poverty and mental health, like trespassing and prostitution. He instructed his deputies not to request money bail and to only seek pretrial detention in narrowly limited categories of cases. This policy does not end money bail, as judges may still impose it on their own, but it will result in more people being released while awaiting trial, thus supporting the presumption of innocence.

Many prosecutors and judges, steeped in harshly punitive approaches, are unhappy. Some are resisting implementing his policies. Some judges reportedly are refusing to dismiss enhancements, while line deputies are signaling their opposition in court. Removing the enhancements or releasing people from pretrial incarceration means prosecutors and judges hold less leverage to extract guilty pleas, causing courts to proceed more slowly and allowing people to contest their charges.

The criminal legal system has prioritized punishment over rehabilitation for decades, even as crime rates declined drastically. In recent years, people are realizing that public safety depends on investments in communities, including in improving access to health, education, housing, and job opportunities, not policing, prosecution, and punishment. Gascons election reflects that shift. His first policy initiatives honor the will of those who elected him and could serve as models for further reforms across the state and country.

John Raphling is a California-based senior researcher on the criminal legal system at Human Rights Watch.

Suggested citation: John Raphling, Where Black Lives Matter Made Their Voices Heard, JURIST Academic Commentary, January 29, 2021, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2021/01/john-raphling-blm-la-county-da-office/.

This article was prepared for publication by Tim Zubizarreta, JURISTs Managing Editor. Please direct any questions or comments to him at commentary@jurist.org.

Opinions expressed in JURIST Commentary are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST's editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.

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Where Black Lives Matter Made Their Voices Heard - JURIST

A group of artists unveiled a Black Lives Matter public art project at the University of Louisiana-Monroes campus earlier this week after they failed to gain public support to paint the social justice movements slogan on a city street in Monroe.

At an unveiling ceremony on Monday, ULM officials welcomed the installation of 16 four-by-eight-foot letters spelling Black Lives Matter on the campus to much fanfare. The public art project stands in Bayou Park, across University Drive from the ULM Library.

We are here today because black lives matter, said ULM President Ron Berry. We also are here today because of art that will remind us the past is unacceptable.

Each letter in the installation was painted to represent different aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement, as envisioned by 16 different artists. For example, the letter B contains the messages, End White Silence and Be the Change. The use of large wooden letters in the art installation resembles the display of painted Greek letters by ULMs fraternities and sororities during Rush Week.

Miss University of Louisiana-Monroe 2020 Allison Newton said black lives should have mattered a long time ago.

All lives cannot matter until black lives matter, said Newton, to applause.

ULM Assistant Professor of Art Brooke Foy thanked Berry, who was named the universitys president last September, for voicing support of the Black Lives Matter art project.

Dr. Berry stood in front of us today, Foy said. Thats inspirational.

ULM officials and students heralded the Black Lives Matter installation as a moment of social justice victory.

I hope that people of color, Foy began, amid tears, I hope you never have to apologize. Or ever compromise how you feel.

Speaking of the art installation, Foy said, It means that change is here. It means that we are ready.

Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, three women who have described themselves as Marxists. In a 2015 video interview with the Real News Network, Cullors defended her commitment to social justice by saying she and her BLM co-founders were trained organizers.

We are trained Marxists, Cullors said during the interview.

Later, when asked in an April 2018 interview with Dazed magazine how someone could learn to spearhead a movement like Black Lives Matter, Cullors said she studied Karl Marx, Soviet premier Vladimir Lenin and Chairman Mao Zedong during her year-long involvement in a program at the National School for Strategic Organizing led by the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, California.

The Labor/Community Strategy Center is a self-described communist organization. In a 2014 column published in the Boston Review, the Labor/Community Strategy Centers director, Eric Mann, wrote, Our work focuses on training a new generation of black and Latino activists in the traditions of black revolutionary, Third World and communist organizing.

In a foreword to the 2018 book, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, Garza wrote that she was loosely trained in the Marxist-Leninist tradition.

In late 2015, Tometi and other black activists welcomed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to Harlem, months before she penned a letter commending the socialist government in Venezuela.

The U.S. has since declared Maduro a dictator, forbade him entry into the country and indicted him for drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.

Garza, Tometi and Cullors social justice movement gained traction on social media as a hashtag in 2013 following a Florida jurys decision to acquit neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin, a black teenager.

Black Lives Matter organizers went to Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 after a police officers fatal shooting of Michael Brown, another black youth. The death of George Floyd in May 2020 in Minneapolis became another flash point for Black Lives Matter activists.

Though the new art installation at ULM promoted the slogan of an organization with Marxist ties, the social justice concerns voiced by Foy and others appeared closer to home.

When asked, Foy said discussions about pursuing a BLM art project stemmed from public outcry over racist remarks by ULM faculty that were uncovered by the universitys students. In one instance, a ULM instructor defended the use of a racial epithet while another professor described President Obama as a monkey.

I think the discussions that happened over the summer, when some racist remarks were posted on social media, and the university responded to that because the students responded to it, Foy said. That really sparked the discussions about the need for change.

When asked what change was sought, Foy said, Oh gosh, equity for all, inclusion for all.

Berry disputed whether a single event provoked a need for the social justice movement to establish itself at ULM.

I wouldnt say this is because of a certain event or anything like that, Berry said.

Its to create awareness and continue discussion. Its about our ongoing evolution as a university.

Foy was one of four artists in the area who spearheaded the project. Her colleagues included Rodrecas Drek Davis, Vitus Shell, and KShana Davis of the Black Creatives Circle of North Louisiana. Foy and her colleagues first asked the Monroe City Council last July to allow them to paint the Black Lives Matter slogan on a city roadway, but public support for that endeavor fizzled out.

We just couldnt move forward on the street, and honestly, were happier to have it here, Foy said.

Foy said she and her colleagues planned for the art installation to be a traveling exhibit.

When asked where it would travel to next, Foy said, We dont have that planned yet.

We dont have a home for it to go next, Foy said.

After her request to the City Council for a roadway mural sparked controversy, Foy and her partners launched a GoFundMe fundraising campaign in early 2020, seeking $10,000 but had only secured $2,600, as of earlier this week.

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Black Lives Matter art installation finds home at ULM - The Franklin Sun

The death of George Floyd last May and the summer of protests that followed in its wake led members of Congress to try to mandate basic changes in police practices nationwide. But partisan and presidential-election politics prevented any bill from being enacted. That failure can be remedied by swift adoption of the reforms set forth in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House last year but stalled in the Senate along with related bills introduced by senators from both parties.

Written by the House Congressional Black Caucus under the leadership of Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles), with an identical version introduced in the Senate by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the Floyd bill addressed decades of racial inequity in policing, but its basic reforms should be demanded by all Americans for their own protection. Supporters of the proposal are expected to reintroduce it this term.

The bill would, for example, prohibit no-knock warrants judicial orders permitting police to burst into peoples homes without warning. Police bearing a no-knock warrant last March killed Breonna Taylor in her own Louisville, Ky., apartment, an incident that has become part of the litany of police outrages against Black Americans. But all Americans are endangered and their freedom diminished by such practices.

Likewise, the measure would prohibit chokeholds of the type that led to the death of Floyd in Minneapolis last year, Eric Garner in Staten Island in 2014, and countless others. The once barely hidden racism in chokehold use has been an open subject at least since 1982, when Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates attempted to explain why it kills so many Black people. We may be finding that in some blacks when it is applied, the veins and arteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people, he famously said.

But again, purported racial disparities aside, police officers should not be cutting off blood and oxygen flow to any American, even those suspected of committing crimes.

Other provisions include the establishment of a federal registry of police misconduct complaints and disciplinary actions, so that officers who are fired or resign after investigations in one department dont simply move to another.

Critics correctly note that Congress has limited power to order states, counties and cities to change their police practices. The no-knock warrant and chokehold bans, for example, would directly apply only to federal law enforcement officers. Federal grants can encourage, but cannot compel, states and local jurisdictions to comply with similar bans.

But such criticism fails to recognize the crucial role of federal leadership in setting acceptable standards for law enforcement. And some provisions the national police registry, for example can indeed have direct impact. A California bill to stop bad cops from jumping from department to department failed last year under pressure from police unions, and even if it is more successful in the current session, its scope is limited to this one state.

Furthermore, the Floyd Act would expressly authorize the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division to issue subpoenas to police departments to determine patterns and practices of misconduct. The department used to conduct such investigations, leading to improved police practices in Los Angeles and a number of other cities, but they were ended under the Trump administration.

Former President Trump offered his own brand of police reforms with an executive order that attempted to address issues like chokeholds, but it was modest in its reach and lacked the force of a bill signed into law. Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina pushed his own bill with some of the same provisions as the House proposal, but it, too, was a victim of last years political jockeying over control of the police reform message.

The real question, Scott asked last year after his bill failed to get a hearing, is this: Do we matter? Meaning, of course, do Black lives matter in the United States?

Congress has a moral obligation to demonstrate that they do, and it can begin with sending police reforms to President Biden, who described Floyds death as a turning point in the nations reckoning with systemic racism Tuesday.

But beyond that obligation, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act or any bill that includes its provisions confronts Congress with an equally urgent set of questions. Does Congress matter? After a period in which the legitimacy of American institutions has been attacked, can it restore faith and respect by demonstrating the will to adopt modest laws that extend basic protections to all Americans? If it cant do that now, we may be in even more trouble than we thought.

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George Floyd bill will tell if Black lives matter to Congress - Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Police Commission announced Friday that the National Police Foundation will assess the LAPD's response to a series of large demonstrations that were held in the city following the in-custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked protests nationwide.

The NPF will hold two virtual listening sessions at noon and 5 p.m. next Thursday to get input from members of the public, business owners and community leaders on interactions they had with officers during demonstrations held between May 27 and June 7.

According to the NPF, the input will be used to identify successes and challenges, and assist it in developing strategies for the LAPD to consider adopting for responding to demonstrations in the future, enhancing police-community relations and identifying how the LAPD and community can move forward.

The NPF bills itself as an independent, nonpartisan research foundation that conducts research into police behavior, policy and procedure.

According to its website, its mission is to advance policing through innovation and science.

The first NPF session can be joined by calling 312-626-6779, meeting ID 923-6097-7810; and the second by calling 312-626-6779, meeting ID 990-8337-3720.

More information is available by visiting policefoundation.org/lapdreview, by emailing PFinfo@policefoundation.org, or by calling 202-721-9779.

In the wake of the protests, Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles lost a bid to get a federal judge to order an immediate halt to the LAPD's use of projectiles, including rubber bullets, to disperse or otherwise control crowds, baton strikes, and the tactic of kettling, in which protesters either leave through an exit controlled by the police or are contained, prevented from leaving, and arrested.

In its response to the BLM-LA filing, plaintiffs' attorneys wrote that the city and LAPD support the constitutional right to engage in peaceful political protests and were assessing the actions police took on six historical, wrenching nights from May 29 to June 3.

After being asked to remove his 'Black Lives Matter' mask at work, a Best Buy employee is taking a stand. Gordon Tokumatzu reports for the NBC4 News at 4 p.m. on July 6, 2020.

The city's attorneys maintained that the immediate wholesale elimination of several LAPD policies, without a more searching examination, is simply not warranted at this time. They also noted that although the mass demonstrations were largely peaceful, there were also criminal acts of arson and looting which threatened public safety, and the LAPD must be able to respond to such situations.

In a federal lawsuit filed in June by the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, BLM-LA and Los Angeles Community Action Network, the plaintiffs maintain there were more than 3,000 people arrested over the course of several days of demonstrations and many were seriously injured by police.

The complaint included graphic photos of alleged protester injuries from rubber bullets and police batons, as well as descriptions of protesters who were held in buses in cramped conditions without access to restrooms, and injuries from too-tight handcuffs.

Dozens of other lawsuits have been filed by individuals who said they were injured by police at the demonstrations, the largest of which were held in downtown Los Angeles, the Fairfax District and Hollywood.

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National Police Foundation to Review LAPD's Response Tactics to BLM Protests - NBC Southern California

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (Fort Wayne's NBC) - An online artist exhibit, put on by Purdue Fort Wayne students, pays tribute to the "Black Lives Matter" movement.

This online-only juried exhibition features artwork by Purdue undergraduate students reflecting on the Black Lives Matter social justice movement.

The art exhibit is titled "A Call For Justice".

Some of the students put together photo collages, videos, music and more.

Fort Wayne's NBC News talked with Christian Stout on how it felt to have his work featured in the online exhibit.

Stout submitted some of his photography from the protests back in the Summer of 2020.

"This was taken on day 2 of the Fort Wayne protests. After walking 5 blocks around the outside of the city we ended up meeting a line of police officers in front of the Hoppy Gnome on Clinton and Berry Street. This next hour tested me mentally seeing the anguish and resilience from many of the protestors as when this picture was shot we had been subjected to tear gas and rubber bullets on two separate occasions beforehand. Everytime we would collect ourselves and push forward. Holding a 20ft gap between us and them. Letting them know that we're here to stay. That we had a purpose. That we were a community of people supporting a cause and each other."

Want to check out the online exhibit? Click here.

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PFW artist exhibit reflects on the Black Lives Matter movement - Fort Wayne's NBC