LOS ANGELES — American Civil Liberties Union of Southern
California staff attorney Peter Bibring today
criticized the L.A. Police Department’s preliminary after-action report about
the May 1 action at MacArthur
Park. His expanded remarks to the
L.A. City Council are below:
"The City of Los
Angeles was promised an open and thorough investigation into the
LAPD’s use of force to disperse a peaceful, permitted assembly on May 1, 2007,
at MacArthur
Park. The department’s preliminary
after-action report falls disturbingly short of that promise. In its omissions
of the critical facts and failure to address the pivotal questions, the
preliminary report threatens to be the first draft of a revisionist history that
will gloss over any failures in training, tactics or command and thereby fail to
find any need for improvements and reforms.
"The report presented to the
Police Commission yesterday purports to address what occurred minute-by-minute,
but does not say when or why the LAPD decided to clear the entire park of
thousands of peaceful participants, including many families. The report does not
mention what training, policy or order could have made officers think they were
justified using foam bullets and batons on members of the media whose
credentials, microphones, and cameras were obviously displayed, and who were
neither resisting arrest nor posing a danger to officers or others. The report
did not mention that the dispersal orders were given only in English, not
Spanish.
"These are the questions the residents of Los Angeles need
answered most, and they were ignored by the Department’s report, and would not
have been raised but for the questions of Police Commissioners yesterday and
Councilmembers today.
"Recent discussion about how many Metro Division
officers received crowd-control training, and how recently, obscures a more
basic question: How can LAPD officers think that use of force is justified
against a person who is responding, in their eyes, too slowly to a dispersal
order, but is not resisting arrest and poses no threat to the safety of officers
or others? The error evident from videotapes is not advanced crowd control, but
basic use of force.
"The constraints on public investigation under the
Police Officer’s Bill of Rights apply only to investigations by a police
department used to determine officer discipline. This need not hamstring
transparency in this extraordinary case. The City Council can and should order a
fully public investigation — with public testimony, evidence and expert opinion
— by an independent body that can be held entirely in the open so long as it is
kept walled off from disciplinary proceedings by the Department. The ACLU of
Southern California calls on the City Council to deliver the degree of openness
that has been promised; it is what this City needs to trust the investigative
process and to begin to heal."