Protestors Clash With Police in Anaheim

[General Mung Beans]

Police, protesters clash as tensions roil Anaheim - latimes.com

Police, protesters clash as tensions roil Anaheim
As street melees erupt, council votes to seek federal probe of killings by officers.
By Ruben Vives, Nicole Santa Cruz and Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times

July 25, 2012, 4:02 a.m.

Simmering tensions in the wake of two deadly police shootings in Anaheim exploded into violence Tuesday night as protesters clashed with police outside City Hall even as officials voted to ask federal authorities to investigate the killings that have rocked the Orange County community.

Protesters hurled rocks, traffic cones and other objects at police clad in riot gear as officers chased people along sidewalks and streets throughout the evening and fired less-than-lethal projectiles into crowds after giving a dispersal order. Sirens wailed as officers formed skirmish lines and police from neighboring law enforcement agencies provided assistance.

Police said that at least five people were arrested on suspicion of assault and resisting arrest, and that a reporter from the Orange County Register was struck by a rock as angry crowds stood face to face with officers in tense standoffs. Fires were started in dumpsters, and at least one storefront had its windows broken as the skirmishes continued into the night.
DISCUSS: Anaheim police protests, shootings

The chaotic scene marked the fourth day of protests since officers shot two men to death over the weekend, outraging residents concerned about police conduct in Anaheim's heavily Latino core.

Joel Mathew Acevedo was shot and killed after he fired at an officer Sunday night. A day earlier, Manuel Angel Diaz was killed after running from police on Anaheim's east side. Five people have died in police shootings in the city this year.

On Tuesday, Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait called for both state and federal investigations, in addition to an ongoing probe by the Orange County district attorney's office. The FBI announced Tuesday it would review Diaz's shooting to see whether it warranted a civil rights investigation.

PHOTOS: Protests against Anaheim police shootings

At the City Council meeting, people surrounded the council chamber to speak out about the accusations of police brutality. Many were turned away from the packed chamber.

The council voted to ask the U.S. attorney's office to launch a probe.

"To the people in the city that are troubled about what happened," Tait said at the meeting, "I'd like to tell you that I am committed to keeping the lines of communication open and to keep the process completely transparent."

Outside, crowds faced off against police at two locations. At South Anaheim Boulevard and West Midway Drive, more than a mile from City Hall, a hostile crowd shouted profanity at officers. Some rocks were thrown.

At Anaheim and Broadway near City Hall, protesters threw bricks, bottles and shoes at officers. One man in a blue jersey was tackled and carried away by police. Others lit firecrackers as people gathered by a gas station and chanted "Si se puede," or "Yes we can."

Shortly before 9 p.m., police at the intersection declared an unlawful assembly and ordered the crowds to disperse.

"If not," an officer shouted through a megaphone, "you will be arrested."

Minutes later, officers fired the projectiles into the crowd as people fled down the streets.

PHOTOS: Protests against Anaheim police shootings

Earlier Tuesday, attorneys for Diaz's mother filed a civil-rights and wrongful-death lawsuit in federal court. The suit, which seeks $50 million in damages, alleges that her unarmed son was shot from behind and then, when he fell to his knees, was shot in the back of the head.

Responding to the litigation, the Anaheim Police Assn. provided the first explanation from the five-year officer who shot Diaz on Saturday afternoon.

According to the police union, officers saw "the documented gang member" who was holding a "concealed object in his front waistband with both hands." Diaz then took off running, only to pull the object from his waistband and turn toward the officers.

"Feeling that Diaz was drawing a weapon, the officer opened fire on Diaz to stop the threat," said Kerry Condon, the association's president.

Officers reported that Diaz tossed away items as he ran, but no gun has been recovered.

Diaz's mother called for residents to refrain from violent protest.

"This is wrong and needs to stop on both sides," Genevieve Huizar said as she sobbed and clutched photos of her son Tuesday afternoon near a memorial on the fence next to where Diaz died.

Latino activists have met with the mayor and encouraged the city to institute a civilian police review board.

"They've seen everything on TV— the dogs, the shootings and just a history of brutality," said Seferino Garcia, executive director of Solevar, an Anaheim community group. "Right now, the community is not going to stand idle. We have a job to do."

Anaheim resident Oscar Velazquez, 25, said Latinos are harassed by police and recounted recently being patted down while walking to his home, a few blocks from Disneyland.

"I've been stopped for no reason," he said. "You don't want your neighbors to see you out there like that."

Where I live of all places. Please pray that these protests don't go out of hand...

 

[muslimsoldier4life]

So to protest violence, they themselves become violent.

 

[Supreme]

Wow, two men killed shot by police? That just isn't good enough. I can understand the first shooting since the suspect was firing at officers, but the second one against the man running away was not necessary. There should be a full investigation into this. The protestors have a darn good point.

 

[General Mung Beans]

Wow, two men killed shot by police? That just isn't good enough. I can understand the first shooting since the suspect was firing at officers, but the second one against the man running away was not necessary. There should be a full investigation into this. The protestors have a darn good point.

Well according to the reports, the second man looked like he was carrying a concealed object. Its standard policy here to shoot in those cases.

 

[DaisyDay]

Well according to the reports, the second man looked like he was carrying a concealed object. Its standard policy here to shoot in those cases.

Shooting someone running away? That doesn't sound right.

 

[General Mung Beans]

Shooting someone running away? That doesn't sound right.

If he looks like he's reaching for a gun or has something like a gun, that seems to be the policy.

 

[General Mung Beans]

Article by NYT on various divides in Anaheim:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/u...es-in-class-and-race.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Fury Reveals Deep Rifts Near ‘Happiest Place on Earth’
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: August 2, 2012 113 Comments

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Visitors to Disneyland pull off the freeway here and drive along dense rows of palm trees on pristine streets, past dozens of hotels beckoning them to stay. It is, the park’s marketing material says, “the Happiest Place on Earth.”

The protests began in response to two fatal police shootings last week, one of which killed Manuel Diaz, whose friends and family gathered for a prayer vigil. The shootings have revealed deep economic and racial divides in the city.

A few blocks away, though, a deep fury has boiled over. There have been days of protests, at times violent, with the police responding in combat gear and placing sharpshooters to guard their headquarters. The mayor says he has never seen such mistrust and anger in two decades in the city.

The latest frustrations began last month when the police killed an unarmed man and then another man a day later. An Anaheim neighborhood, just five miles north of Disneyland, quickly erupted. Protests continued. A community meeting is scheduled for next Wednesday. It is expected to draw about 1,000 residents.

There have always been divides in this city south of Los Angeles, where Disneyland and professional hockey and baseball teams bring in millions of visitors each year. The money generated by the resort area makes up roughly a third of the city’s annual income. But few visitors ever see the poor neighborhoods just beyond Disneyland Drive. As the protests exploded last week, the park’s nightly fireworks continued just a few miles away.

While most of the city’s population of nearly 350,000 lives on the west side of the bowtie-shaped city, in recent decades a wealthy enclave known as Anaheim Hills has flourished to the east. The hills are about 15 miles away from downtown, more like a separate town than a part of this mostly working-class and largely Latino city. There, household income is roughly twice as much as in the flatlands, as the rest of the city is known.

Like most of the City Council, Mayor Tom Tait lives in Anaheim Hills. Last week, he asked federal investigators to look into the Police Department’s practices. This week, trying to grapple with how the city could move on, he called a meeting with executives from Disney, as well as the Los Angeles Angels and the Anaheim Ducks, asking them to help come up with programs to help the most struggling neighborhoods in the city.

In those neighborhoods, the mostly Latino residents have grappled with unemployment, poverty, crime and gangs for years. Now, suddenly, those longstanding problems are being thrust into wider view.

“The problem is in that in some of these neighborhoods, there’s really a lack of hope from people, and they turn to gangs and crime,” said Mr. Tait, who has lived in the city since 1988. “We need people to go into the areas that lack hope and find ways to help.”

Spokesmen for Disney and the sports teams declined to comment about the meeting.

Across much of the flatlands, for now at least, there is a widespread suspicion of the city’s elite. Young men complain about being unfairly singled out by the police. Mothers worry that their children are not getting enough support in schools to stay out of trouble. Activists charge that city officials have focused on development around Disneyland and in Anaheim Hills at the expense of the rest of the city.

For more than a generation, Disney has been the power center of the city. The park draws millions of visitors each year and is the city’s largest property tax payer and employer.

In 2007, when a developer proposed a high-rise building with affordable housing, Disney spent more than $2 million to back a group called Save Our Anaheim Resort Area, which opposed the plan and successfully persuaded the city to abandon the idea. Since then, the group changed the verb in its name from “save” to “support” and has created a political action committee that funneled thousands of dollars to candidates, largely money collected from Disney and businesses near the resort, while Disney has continued to donate millions directly to candidates. Disney officials point out that they donate millions of dollars to local nonprofit groups every year.

“Our political action committee is focused on electing resort-district-friendly officials, not just at City Hall but also county supervisors and state senators, anyone voting on matters that would affect the district,” said Jill Kanzler, the executive director of the group.

Earlier this year, tensions flared when the City Council approved a tax incentive to a developer for a $283 million project to build two luxury hotels across from Disneyland. Typically, the city collects a 15 percent tax for every stay in the city. The incentive plan will allow the developers to keep the money from the tax for the next 15 years, an amount estimated to be $158 million.

“Throughout the city people are facing real problems with working poverty and struggling to get the resources and attention that others parts of town get routinely,” said Eric Altman, the executive director of Orange County Communities Organized for Responsible Development, an advocacy group that has been critical of city government. “There is the basic question of why is it in a city with those kind of resources can we have such extreme poverty?”

Mr. Altman said the most recent tax deal is “essentially the city printing money” for investors in the resort area.

Harry Sidhu, the mayor pro tem, who has been on the Council for eight years, said that without such subsidies, developers would choose to build in other cities, costing Anaheim jobs and tax dollars. But he dismisses charges that other parts of Anaheim have suffered and that the current election system, which elects members citywide rather than from geographic districts, is unfair. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on the process, saying it underrepresents Latinos.

“If they don’t elect their own people, you can’t say we are at fault,” Mr. Sidhu said. “We look at the city as one place, we all get the same police services and community services.”

Mr. Sidhu and other city officials frequently say that Anaheim is one of the safest cities of its size in the country. Yet last year, as crime dropped nationally, the city had one of the biggest spikes in violent crime in the state. Few of those episodes were in Anaheim Hills.

Like much of northern Orange County, Anaheim has changed drastically in the years since Disneyland opened in 1955. It grew rapidly through the 1990s, and as the Latino population nearly doubled, it became one of the largest cities in the state. Today, the city is more than half Latino.

Many residents are grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants, some raised on the history of the city’s complicated relationship with Latinos. An explosive conflict between the police and residents in 1978 led to several changes in the department. A once gang-infested neighborhood just across from Disneyland was knocked down and renamed. At one point, a city official tried to stop a Mexican supermarket from opening. In the late 1990s, a chief of police ordered background reports on Latino activists who accused the department of misconduct.

Sgt. Juan Reveles has been with the department’s gang unit for nearly a decade. The unit has grown to 11 officers, more than double the size it was two years ago. Now, the city has roughly 30 active gangs and all but one are Latino, he said, with about half made up of relatively recent immigrants.

During a community meeting after a police shooting earlier this year, Sergeant Reveles called the gangs “a failure of the Hispanic community.”

“You would have thought I threw a grenade in the crowd,” he said in an interview. “But I am going to call it what it is, not pretend it’s different.”

“The anti-police attitude now is at a level I have never seen before,” he said. But, he continued, “If officers start to say there’s just too much of a headache and we’re not going in there, it’s the residents who suffer. You can’t measure the quality-of-life differences when people are too scared to go downstairs to their own laundry room because gang bangers are kicking back there.”

Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 3, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of money that the political action committee of the Disney-backed group Support Our Anaheim Resort Area has funneled to candidates. The amount is in the thousands, not millions. Disney has continued to donate millions directly to candidates.

 

[usexpat97]

Any time the cops murder someone in cold blood, there is always some "object" to justify it. I wonder what percentage of American citizens are carrying something in a pocket at any point in time out on the street? It's amazing any cops ever make it home.

 

[General Mung Beans]

Any time the cops murder someone in cold blood, there is always some "object" to justify it. I wonder what percentage of American citizens are carrying something in a pocket at any point in time out on the street? It's amazing any cops ever make it home.

There's a difference if one is actually using an "object" or reaching for it.

 

[usexpat97]

Not really. It's all pretextual in the end.

 

[Paxton25]

So to protest violence, they themselves become violent.

NO. First they peacefully protested and were subjected to police brutality. They sicked a German Shepherd on a baby in a stroller for crying out loud! That sparked the riot.

Anaheim police open fire and use K-9 on women and children. - YouTube

After the riot, military police with grenade launchers and other military weapons descended on the area. It was essentially martial law. See photos for July 29, 30, and 31.
Anaheim, Anaheim Pd, Opanaheim, Anaheimprotest, Apdriot, Anna, La Palma, Anaheim City Hall, Disneyland, Anaheimpd, Somosanaheim, Weareanaheim, Disney

 

[muslimsoldier4life]

NO. First they peacefully protested and were subjected to police brutality. They sicked a German Shepherd on a baby in a stroller for crying out loud! That sparked the riot.

How many times was Dr. King and his supporters beaten, hosed and shot? Yet they still peacefully protested.

 

[usexpat97]

Even if the American citizens were not peaceful, I would still support them. The U.S. was not founded by peaceful protests.

 

[mpok1519]

If he looks like he's reaching for a gun or has something like a gun, that seems to be the policy.

All a cop has to say is "he looked like he could have been going for a possible gun."

 

[mpok1519]

How many times was Dr. King and his supporters beaten, hosed and shot? Yet they still peacefully protested.

Let me sick a dog on your baby; how long before you grab a gun?

 

[mpok1519]

Even if the American citizens were not peaceful, I would still support them. The U.S. was not founded by peaceful protests.

That's before we gained independence. Different situation.

 

[usexpat97]

The only thing different about the situation is the color of the uniforms.

 

[mpok1519]

And the time. The state of the union. The surrounding circumstances. The context of the situation. Etc.

Dont compare peaceful assembly of today with actions of war during the revolution for independence. The revolutionaries were protesting and waging war because they were not being represented by their respective government. The protesters in LA are protesting botched police procedure that resulted in the death of members of the community.

 

[muslimsoldier4life]

Let me sick a dog on your baby; how long before you grab a gun?

Again, they could have been peaceful. Dr. King and them were blasted with fire hoses, bitten by dogs and beaten by police; yet they still remained steadfast in a non-violent means of protest.

 

[mpok1519]

Because they had no choice because of systemic discrimination that sought to limit protections of human rights.

I think the context is a bit different.