LAPD always pays for the demonstrations of George Floyd. Will proceedings force the change?

While mass demonstrations against the police murder of George Floyd raged in Los Angeles at the end of May 2020, the LAPD had an unexpected problem.

After a week of demonstrations, the police had licensed so many projectiles to control “less lethal” crowds in rubber that the stock of the department was low.

Standing to buy more, managers organized two reserve officers to pilot a private plane for Casper, Wyo., To recover 2,000 additional rounds from a weapon wholesaler called Safariland, according to LAPD emails examined by the Times.

The days and weeks that followed brought more problems in the streets, police criticized for having drawn rubber tours without discrimination in crowds, injuring dozens of people with gunshots on the face or torso.

Multiple reports and activists began the ministry’s response to demonstrations as a sloppy operation which resulted from poor planning, inadequate training and a lack of learning past errors.

According to the analysis of the lapd data times published by the City prosecutor’s office, police actions linked to George Floyd demonstrations cost $ 11.9 million in colonies and jury prices. Dozens of other pending prosecutions potentially represent tens of millions of additional people in exposure to responsibility.

However, five years withdrawn from the murder of Floyd, the donors say that public opinion has largely brought back in favor of the application of aggressive laws, stressing as proof of the adoption of the difficult legislation on the crime and ousted of progressive prosecutors.

Last month, President Trump published an executive decree promising to “release local police forces with high impact” in the campaign of his administration against “criminal foreigners”.

The United States Ministry of Justice moved last week to cancel the colonies to revise the police in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis. Federal surveillance was part of the national calculation of racism and police brutality which followed the murders of the law enforcement for Breonna Taylor and Floyd, who was pinned on the sidewalk by a police officer for almost 10 minutes before dying.

The pressure to revise the LAPD that started in 2020 did not cause scanning changes, but the police service has somehow come to look like the offset version sought by certain activists.

Although its budget of several billion dollars has increased, the number of low -level arrests and traffic stops has dropped, and endowment shortages have forced the ministry to focus more on the response and resolution of violent crimes.

Today, the department is nearly 1,300 officers smaller than when Floyd has died, with fewer cops on force than in any time since 1995, reflecting the national reductions in the police.

On Thursday, the Los Angeles Municipal Council signed a $ 14 billion spending plan for 2025-26 which reduces the funding for the recruitment of the police in order to avoid dismissing hundreds of workers in the city. The council provided enough money for the LAPD to hire 240 new officers in the coming year, down compared to the 480 proposed by Mayor Karen Bass last month.

Questioned in an appearance of News radio last week if Floyd’s death had changed police, LAPD chief Jim McDonnell, said that it was, largely with the hiring crisis.

The ministry has lost dozens of cops who did not “feel support,” he said, and recruitment continues to be difficult.

“It therefore had a negative impact on the profession as a whole,” he told the Kcrw public radio station. “We must restore morale within the organization; We must restore pride within the profession. ”

After years of calls to adopt alternatives to traditional police services, LAPD officials and city leaders continue to explore means to make calls involving drug addiction, homelessness and mental illness. Agents no longer respond to minor traffic accidents.

The efforts to limit the participation of police traffic have gained in traction, and a controversial policy promulgated by former chef Michel Moore still restricts the pretextual stops of motorists or pedestrians who, according to criticism, led to disproportionate harassment of black and brown Angelenos. The ministry has also taken measures to try to limit dangerous activities by asking supervisors to monitor them in real time, and if the pursuit is too dangerous, to cancel them.

Police data show that violent crimes continue to pass pandemic peaks, with the exception of aggressions and aggravated flights in certain parts of the city. The crimes of goods, including most burglaries, have also started to decrease.

Some reform efforts have stopped, including a proposal to revise the department’s disciplinary system for officers. Another plan that would have replaced the LAPD officers with unarmed transport workers on traffic stops flouted in the midst of the debates around jurisdiction and financing.

Art Acevedo, which began his career with California Highway Patrol before being a police chief in several major cities, including Houston and Miami, blamed the movements to “finance” and “abolish” the police for polarizing the debate on how to go ahead.

Acevedo, who applied for the work of the LAPD chief who finally went to McDonnell, said that the unions and the allies armed such rhetoric because it “actually assimilated to the defense of the police reform as one and the same thing as the defense of police financing”.

“This movement has created an upheaval which resulted in a decreased appetite” for the reform, he said.

Acevedo also worried that the officers felt embarrassment to bend or break the rules in the current climate: “You do not want to recreate the perception, real or not, whether it is an open season for a bad police, because you will have this little percentage that will act on this belief that they will not be held responsible.”

Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, shared similar concerns.

“I think they feel absolutely unleashed,” she said about the police. “Not that they were never on a leash.”

Part of the problem, said Abdullah, is public fatigue on the apparently constant dam of disturbing incidents.

“People do not have the bandwidth to answer with the kind of indignation they would do when you saw the blows to Pan Pacific Park,” said Abdullah, referring to the LAPD response to the demonstrations in 2020.

John Burton, a lawyer who filed prosecution on behalf of several people injured by less lethal towers during Los Angeles demonstrations in 2020, said most of the changes to the LAPD were on the edges, but the department did not approach its culture of aggression.

The lack of progress, he said, is obvious in the surveys of the internal affairs of the LAPD that he examined who rarely found something wrong with the strength of the officers-even in the face of overwhelming video evidence. More than a few officers mentioned in his lawsuits have since been promoted, he said, even after accused of lying in police reports.

LAPD supervisors looked in the other direction, he said, because they are “very protective” of their officers.

Burton also noted that rubber projectiles are still used, despite little evidence, weapons have helped brake chaos in the streets. Police also made criticisms last year for the treatment of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on USC and UCLA campuses.

“The thought that you will prevent someone from throwing a rock on the cops by turning one of these first is a fantasy,” he said. “They can cause very serious injuries.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.