June 22, 2023
City News Service
Relatives of Keenan Anderson, a Black man who went into cardiac arrest and died after being Tasered multiple times in a struggle with Los Angeles police in Venice, announced the filing of a lawsuit against the city on June 19.
Anderson, the father of a 5-year-old son, had been a teacher for more than eight years, the past six months at Digital Pioneers Academy, a charter high school in Washington, D.C. The 31-year-old Anderson had been in the Los Angeles area visiting relatives during the holidays when he got into the Jan. 3 confrontation with police following a minor traffic collision near Lincoln and Venice boulevards.
Attorneys said police used a Taser on Anderson six times, causing his heart to later flutter and ultimately fail. He died hours later at a hospital.
A subsequent autopsy determined that Anderson died from the effects of an enlarged heart and cocaine use.
Los Angeles attorney Carl Douglas, representing Anderson's family along with famed national civil rights attorney Ben Crump, acknowledged the drug use, but said it doesn't justify officers' actions.
“I don't think there's going to be a challenge to the determination that there were in fact drugs in Mr. Anderson's system,” Douglas said during a morning news conference. “The video shows he died because he was Tasered more than six times on the back of his heart. We will have experts that will confirm the connection between the actions of police and his death.”
He added, “It matters not why he was in distress because it's clear from the body-worn footage that he was never a threat. He spoke to the officers politely. He was always compliant. He never balled his fists. He never kicked. He never did anything to give an officer the belief that he was a threat.”
Earlier this year, the LAPD released some edited body-camera footage showing the encounter between Anderson and police. At one point, the video shows Anderson being held down on the ground, with Anderson crying out that officers were trying to “George Floyd” him, a reference to the man who died while being restrained by police in Minneapolis.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers, issued a statement earlier saying Anderson escalated the confrontation with his behavior, which included running away from officers into traffic.
“Minor auto accidents are usually handled with an exchange of information between the drivers and a call to one's insurance carrier,'' according to the LAPPL. “On the other hand, when an individual who is high on cocaine is in an accident, tries to open the car door of an innocent driver, and then flees the scene by running into traffic, police officers must act.''
The Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit alleges civil rights violations, assault and battery, false imprisonment and negligence.
The suit seeks unspecified damages, although attorneys said they would ask for damages of $100 million. The family had earlier filed a required damages claim against the city seeking $50 million, but it was rejected.
Anderson was one of three men who died in confrontations with the LAPD during the first three days of the year. The two other men were fatally shot. The deaths prompted a series of protests, demands for the ouster of LAPD Chief Michel Moore and calls for changes in the way the agency responds to traffic crashes.
Anderson was a cousin of Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.
June 22, 2023
LAWT News Service
The Los Angeles City Council elected Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson as the new president pro tempore on Tuesday, June 20.
Harris-Dawson replaces Curren Price, who stepped down from the position and faces possible suspension from the council after being charged with embezzlement, perjury and conflict of interest.
In a 12-to-0 vote, the council moved to appoint Harris-Dawson as president pro tempore with council members Monica Rodriguez and Curren Price absent from the vote. Price was not in attendance at Tuesday's meeting and he will not attend any of the remaining meetings this week, according to his office.
“With that vote, I'm pleased to congratulate our new Council President Pro Tem Marqueece Harris-Dawson,” Council President Paul Krekorian said. “I'd like to ask you to come up on and take the desk.”
Harris-Dawson has represented Council District 8 since 2015 and currently chairs the Planning Land Use and Management Committee. During his tenure, he has promoted initiatives and policies to combat homelessness, create quality jobs and encourage community policing.
Also, Harris-Dawson has continuously advocated on behalf of the unhoused. In 2016, he co-authored Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond for permanent supportive housing for homeless individuals and people at risk of becoming homeless. Voters overwhelmingly approved the measure by 77% to 23%.
A native of South Los Angeles, the new president pro tem graduated from Morehouse College and earned a certificate in nonprofit management from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He previously served as president/CEO of the Community Coalition, a nonprofit organization founded by Mayor Karen Bass.
His commendations include the Do Something "BRICK" Award, The Wellness Foundation Sabbatical Award, the NAACP Man of Valor Award, Durfee Foundation's Stanton Fellowship, and Liberty Hill Foundation's Upton Sinclair Award.
According to his bio on the CD 8 website, “Councilmember Harris-Dawson understands how decades of systematic disinvestment have harmed our communities and believes the people of South L.A. are its greatest resource.
“As a long-time community organizer in South LA, Councilmember Harris-Dawson is never afraid to discuss issues of race and equity and relies on his deep roots and relationships to build public trust and collaborative solutions.”
June 08, 2023
LAWT News Service
KPA Constructors has played a noteworthy role on the $1.8 billion LA Metro Regional Connector project, which opens on June 16, due in large part to the LA Regional Contractor Development and Bonding Program (CDABP), which assists small and diverse firms in overcoming barriers, building their capacities, and winning government contracts. The LA Regional CDABP is a three-pronged effort that includes LA Metro, the City of LA, and the County of LA.
For the two-mile line in downtown LA that links three Metro rail lines (i.e., Gold, Blue, Expo), KPA Constructors was awarded a $3.7 million contract. The company’s staff furnished and installed the project’s radio communication system, a critical infrastructure component that allows Metro and first responders to communicate with the outside world from inside the underground stations and tunnels.
The CDABP was instrumental in enabling KPA Constructors to win and execute the Metro contract. For example, the CDABP helped the firm obtain the required bond, other financial support, and technical assistance.
Karl Percell, the president of KPA Constructors, said, “The program has played an integral role in the ongoing success of my company. It is a great program that helps small and diverse firms like mine.”
The CDABP provides bonding assistance, contract financing, technical support, education and training, networking and matchmaking facilitation, and more. The program services are offered at no cost to participants and is administered by Merriwether & Williams Insurance Services.
The LA Regional CDABP wants to help more small and diverse firms like KPA Constructors access construction contracts. For more information on the program’s benefits and enrollment process, go online to www.LAConDev.com.
June 22, 2023
By Bianca Vázquez, Ed White and Adrian Sainz
Associated Press
Americans across the country this past weekend celebrated Juneteenth, marking the relatively new national holiday with cookouts, parades and other gatherings as they commemorated the end of slavery after the Civil War.
While many have treated the long holiday weekend as a reason for a party, others urged quiet reflection on America's often violent and oppressive treatment of its Black citizens.
And still others have remarked at the strangeness of celebrating a federal holiday marking the end of slavery in the nation while many Americans are trying to stop parts of that history from being taught in public schools.
"Is #Juneteenth the only federal holiday that some states have banned the teaching of its history and significance?" Author Michelle Duster asked on Twitter this weekend, referring to measures in Florida, Oklahoma and Alabama prohibiting an Advancement Placement African American studies course or the teaching of certain concepts of race and racism.
Monday's federal holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they had been freed - two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued during the bloody Civil War.
On Juneteenth weekend, a Roman Catholic church in Detroit devoted its service to urging parishioners to take a deeper look at the lessons from the holiday.
"In order to have justice we must work for peace. And in order to have peace we must work for justice," John Thorne, executive director of the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance, said to the congregation at Gesu Catholic Church in Detroit.
Standing before paintings of a Black Jesus and Mary, Thorne said Juneteenth is a day of celebration, but it also "has to be much more."
It was important to speak about Juneteenth during Sunday Mass, the Rev. Lorn Snow told a reporter as the service was ending.
"The struggle's still not over with. There's a lot of work to be done," he said.
Most Black Americans agree, according to a recent poll. A full 70% of Black adults queried in a AP-NORC poll said "a lot" needs to be done to achieve equal treatment for African Americans in policing. And Black Americans suffer from significantly worse health outcomes than their white peers across a variety of measures, including rates of maternal mortality, asthma, high blood pressure and Alzheimer's disease.
Although end-of-slavery celebrations are new in many parts of the country, in Memphis, where the slave trade once thrived, the Juneteenth holiday has been celebrated since long before it became a designated federal holiday in 2021. The Tennessee Legislature passed a bill earlier this year making it a state holiday, as well.
Festivities there include a multi-day festival including food, music, arts and crafts, and cultural exhibitions in a tree-lined park in the city's medical district. The Memphis park once held an equestrian statue and the grave of slave trader and Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. The statue and the body were moved in recent years.
Memphis is home to the National Civil Rights Museum located at the site of the old Lorraine Motel, the former Black-owned hotel where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968. The museum is offering free admission on Monday to mark the holiday. At the museum, visitors can hear recorded speeches from civil rights leaders including King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and others.
Ryan Jones, the museum's associate curator, said Juneteenth should be celebrated in the U.S. with the same emphasis that July 4 receives as Independence Day.
"It is the independence of a people that were forced to endure oppression and discrimination based on the color of their skin," Jones said.
The Juneteenth holiday, Jones said, should also be viewed as more than a day when people attend parties and cookouts. In fact, he said, it is a time to reflect on the past.
"It acknowledges the sacrifices of those early civil rights veterans between World War I and World War II, and of course in the modern society, the protests, the demonstrations, the non-violence, the marches," Jones said.
As Americans gathered to mark the holiday, it wasn't without incident. In a Chicago suburb late Saturday night, one person was killed and 22 were injured in a shooting still being investigated Sunday by police. One witness said the party in the parking lot of a Willowbrook, Illinois, strip-mall was a Juneteenth celebration.
The White House released a statement on Sunday, June 18, saying: "The President and First Lady are thinking of those killed and injured in the shooting in Illinois last night. We have reached out to offer assistance to state and local leaders in the wake of this tragedy at a community Juneteenth celebration."
The holiday observance continues Monday with Vice President Kamala Harris appearing on a CNN special with musical guests including Miguel and Charlie Wilson.
June 08, 2023
Danny J. Bakewell, Jr.
Executive Editor
On Monday, June 26, Judge Dale S. Fischer will hear two motions by former Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas’ defense team to reconsider the jury’s guilty verdicts, which were rendered in March of this year.
These Rule 29 and Rule 33 procedural motions are considered long shots by legal experts and are prerequisites to Ridley-Thomas’s August 21st sentencing and appeal.
In the court filings, the Ridley-Thomas defense team asserts that the prosecution’s case relied on false testimony and incomplete investigations of the facts by the FBI’s lead investigator and government’s star witness. Defense lawyers for Ridley-Thomas have filed two motions with the court arguing that his conviction be overturned and that he deserves a new trial.
His defense team argues in the court filings that the government’s star witness, FBI Agent Brian Adkins, gave false testimony on at least three occasions.
In their second filing, the defense team outlines multiple instances where the government failed to present sufficient evidence on the charges and in some cases, argues “a total failure of proof,” which should lead, according to the filings, to an outright acquittal of the jury’s conviction.
On March 30, the jury found Ridley-Thomas guilty of four counts of honest services wire fraud and one count each of bribery, conspiracy and honest services mail fraud. The case stemmed from his time as a member of L.A. County’s powerful Board of Supervisors and involved his support of a contract with USC’s School of Social Work for Tele-Health, a virtual mental health treatment program run by the university.
The jury, however, did find Ridley-Thomas not guilty of all fraud counts related to Probation University and the Vermont Street Reentry Center, as well as all counts related to the USC admission, scholarship, and Professor of Practice appointment of his son, former Assemblymember Sebastian Ridley-Thomas.
In all, Ridley-Thomas was found guilty on seven counts and not guilty of 12 of the 19 charges brought against him by the government.
The conviction brought an immediate end to Ridley-Thomas term as an L.A. City Council member and sent shockwaves throughout Los Angeles’ African American community where Ridley-Thomas served and been a fearless advocate for over three decades.
A group of Ridley Thomas supporters calling themselves CD10 Voices has once again called for “public demonstration of support for MRT.” They allege that community support remains critically important to illustrate wide skepticism about the verdict, the depth of interest in the case and the strength of solidarity with the defendant.
In an urgent plea for backers, CD 10 Voices wrote in an email that “in the interest of fairness and justice, please plan to attend the hearing on Monday, June 26.”
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