Devin Brown
LAPD Officer Shoots and Kills Youth in South Los Angeles
On February 6, just before 4:00 a.m., an LAPD officer shot and killed Devin Brown, a 13-year-old African American eighth grader who attended Auburn Middle School, a magnet school in South Los Angeles for gifted students. Brown, unarmed, was driving a 1990 Honda Accord and had led police on a three-minute pursuit. The police fired ten rounds into the car while Brown was driving toward the police cruiser in reverse. Many details, such as the timing of the shots (whether they occurred before or after Brown collided with the vehicle), the speed of the vehicle, and the exact direction from which the shots were fired, have yet to be determined.
The shooting sparked an outcry, tapped deep into the long, troubling history of the Los Angeles Police Department's treatment of the African American community it serves in South Los Angeles, and elicited political and policy responses from mayoral candidates, community leaders, and LAPD Chief William Bratton.
"Devin Brown is now another iconic name in a long and devastating list of people of color who were killed, maimed, or brutalized by the LAPD: Eulia Love, Rodney King, Margaret Mitchell, Anthony Lee, and Stanley Miller, to name a few," said Ramona Ripston, ACLU/SC executive director. "Each case, though an individual and a family tragedy, is also a community tragedy, a story of the ongoing and still unresolved problem of police brutality experienced by the residents of South Los Angeles."
African American community leaders spoke out strongly in the days following the shooting, articulating the anguish and anger of a community caught between the need for strong community-based policing and the reality of the LAPD's presence, characterized by many community members as "hostile" and "gang-like."
"We have a pattern here where some police officers don't value the lives of young African American males," John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League told the Los Angeles Times. "There's a frustration here that's building up and makes it difficult to build a partnership with the police."
Congresswoman Maxine Waters expressed a similar sense of witnessing history repeat itself.
"When I learned about the killing of 13-year-old Devin Brown, an African American boy, on a street corner in South Central Los Angeles, quite frankly, my reaction was, 'Once again, the police in our community act as judge, jury and executioner,'" said Waters.
Many observers, including Waters, pointed out that the shooting came at an especially tense time in LAPD's relationship to the community. Just three days before the shooting, the District Attorney's office declined to press charges against the officer involved in the beating of Stanley Miller, whose brutal beating by a police officer with a large metal flashlight, was caught on video. And two weeks before that, the Inglewood police officers involved in the Donovan Jackson beating, who claimed they were victims of discrimination, won a $2.4 million jury award.
"Shifting a whole institutional culture and style of policing is obviously a Herculean task, an enormous challenge that has taken decades and is far from finished," said Ripston. "We've had commissions, reports, panels, reforms, policy changes, and now, even a consent decree, and many of us are asking ourselves: 'What will it take finally to create the fundamental change that is so clearly needed?'"
Ripston cited both the promise and the limits of specific policy tools such as racial profiling data collection. As an intervener in the LAPD consent decree between the federal government and the city, the ACLU continues to insist on the comprehensive analysis of the traffic and pedestrian stop data that the LAPD is currently gathering.
"The data will give us more information about the underlying culture of the department and its training needs," said Ripston. "But it can't tell us what to do next. That's still fairly uncharted territory."
"We have a lot of thinking and hard work to do," continued Ripston, who suggested a series of steps that "might bring us closer" to a "true partnership" between police and the residents of South Los Angeles, including:
· Paying more attention to police officers' residency patterns and developing programs to recruit and train more police officers who live in the communities they police.
· A commitment on the part of the city to tie any future increases in police staffing to community-based policing in the areas most in need of it.
· Exploring more local forms of citizen oversight, closer to affected communities and composed of community members.
· Examining and overhauling all of LAPD's use-of-force policies and revising them based on best practices from around the world.
"Police accountability, after all these decades, is still one of the fundamental, defining civil rights issues in Los Angeles," said Ripston.
FEBRUARY 2005
Download Issue as PDF
Governor Proposes Budget with Deep Cuts, Harsh Real-Life Consequences
High School Students Fight Back Against Hate
LAPD Officer Shoots and Kills Youth in South Los Angeles
California Expands Domestic Partnership Rights
Civil Rights & International Human Rights Advocate to Lead ACLU/SC
State Legislative Preview: Beyond the Budget
ACLU Takes Aggressive Stance on Torture and Detentions
