Heads Roll in Los Angeles

[tcrashfx]

The first scapegoats in the May Day melee walk the plank.

By Jack Dunphy

On Friday, word circulated through the Los Angeles Police Department that a protest rally was being planned for the following day in MacArthur Park, the scene of last Tuesday’s May Day melee. A colleague asked me if I would be interested in adjusting my schedule and working crowd control at the rally. I declined.

The rally turned out to be a spectacular dud, as it happened, attracting far more cops and reporters than protesters, but staying clear of it was nonetheless the wiser course. In fact, for however many days, months, or years I have left in my police career, I plan on staying as far away as possible from MacArthur Park. There was no violence there on Saturday, but it’s a dead certainty that there will one day be another confrontation between cops and immigration protesters like the one that occurred on May Day, and when that day comes some unfortunate cop will have to have his head lopped off before the LAPD brass will allow us to even raise our voices about it.

On Monday, LAPD Chief William Bratton defied my prediction that only front-line officers would be disciplined for their roles in what happened at the park on May Day. Appearing at a press conference with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Bratton announced that the senior officer who oversaw police response to the protests was being demoted and removed from his command. Deputy Chief Cayler “Lee” Carter, a 33-year veteran of the department, has been chosen to wear the goat horns. He will be reduced in rank to commander and “assigned to home duties,” which is to say his career is over. Carter’s second-in-command, Commander Louis Gray, a 39-year veteran, has been reassigned to duties yet to be specified, but his career is essentially over as well. Call him the Assistant Goat.

Neither Carter nor Gray are particularly admired at my level of the department, but to a man the cops I’ve spoken with are in sympathy with them. As was demonstrated in the opening hours of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and in the violence that followed the Lakers’ NBA championship in 2000, LAPD commanders are a timid lot, tending toward indecision when the need for action is evident to all but them. So it came as a welcome surprise when, after repeated provocations by an unruly crowd, Carter gave the order to shut down what was left of the May Day rally at MacArthur Park.

article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTgxZmYzODgxZjc4ZGNlZDViZjI4Mjc3Yzc1YTcxYzA

[RuneDeer]

It's amusing and frustrating by turns when you're listening to a news story on the radio and someone messes up the reading. Yesterday a local station had this story and misread "reassigned" as "resigned," and they were several sentences in when they tried to correct it. So it was easy to start out thinking Bratton had quit altogether. An hour later, the same station ran the story again and had apparently re-written it for easier reading. They took out "reassigned" entirely and changed it to "demoted."

[stray]

I know a few good ways to eliminate issues like this before they occur....