Two Deputy Sheriffs were shot at close range in cold blood in Compton, prompting furious anger from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.
The community is also angry. This was an opportunity for LASD to lock arms with the community. Instead, in a series of tweets, the department responded with racist derision (as reported in this morning’s L.A. Times):
Within 24 hours, a longtime Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman posted tweets about the attack that employed racist stereotypes in reference to a reward for information leading to the arrest of the shooter. In one post accompanied by a GIF of a Black man shuffling bills, she wrote: “And here’s the neighborhood homies and enemies ‘bout to come up’ on that $100,000 #REWARD because $100,000 dollas is $100,000 dollas.”
And this:
“My advice to all the ex-girlfriends, side pieces, friends, wifey, ol’ lady, dime, queen, baby momma who know the #ComptonAmbush shooter of 2 LA Sheriff’s about getting that $100,000 #REWARD…,” Navarro-Suarez wrote next to an image of a Black woman saying, “Make that money girl.”
There was also the rough encounter with the diminutive reporter for KPCC, the region’s all news and information NPR station, being roughly jerked around and slammed into the pavement as she was being arrested — apparently for doing her job.
The video doesn’t match the department’s characterization of what happened. And, in another instance of Us vs. Them, Sheriff Alex Villanueva has even gratuitously “singled out Lakers star LaBron James — who has been vocal about systemic racism.”
Columnist Erika D. Smith, casting a wider net of the department’s challenges (“We don’t know much about the ambush of two L.A. County deputies. But we have scapegoats”), adds this:
Through all of this, Villanueva has been stonewalling investigations by L.A. County Inspector General Max Huntsman, cutting off one of the only avenues the public has for accountability and oversight.
LASD’s motto is, A Tradition of Service. The patterns we’re witnessing are hardly examples of fulfilling that mission.