Los Angeles, where prosecutors here are determining whether to retry six Black Lives Matter activists whose trial recently ended in a hung jury. The six face misdemeanor charges for barricading the 101 freeway in Los Angeles in November of 2014 in response to the non-indictment of the former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown that had happened three months earlier. Activist Rosa Clemente was also tried, but was acquitted. Supporters say the prosecution is part of a larger effort by the LAPD and City Attorney’s Office targeting Black Lives Matter activists here in L.A.
Nana Gyamfi talking:
This is a case in which we really see the Los Angeles Police Department and the city attorney join forces to suppress and repress the speech for black lives on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement in Los Angeles. We had a national day of protest, which occurred not just in Los Angeles but all over the country, three days of protests right before Thanksgiving in 2014, in which Los Angeles arrested over 330 people, the largest number of arrests in any city. If you think back, Amy, to all of those people in New York City, all of those people in Washington, D.C., and yet none of those cities—Chicago—had that many arrests, Los Angeles was way far beyond what you saw in any of those cities.
And then—that happened in November—they decided only to prosecute about 20 people, which was less than 9 percent of the people whom they arrested. And when we look at who they prosecuted, you find that they were all the Black Lives Matter members who were arrested. You find that they were people that were associated with known groups and organizations that were speaking up on behalf of black lives. It was clearly targeted. It wasn’t just—you know, people who threw bottles at police officers were not tried, were not put on—had no charges against them. And yet, folks who engaged in nonviolent, peaceful protest found themselves in positions in which they were actually being tried as criminals.
you have the conspiracy, and then you feel the real thing. And we found that Black Lives Matter folks had been chosen based upon surveillance that had been done, that the Los Angeles Police Department and the City Attorney’s Office have this political prosecution unit, that’s sort of informal, that started with the Occupy movement and then got bumped up with the Black Lives Matter movement, in which they gave officers overtime, carte blanche, to go through all of social media, Facebook, Twitter, all the different—Instagram, everything they had at that time, and spend hours taking snapshots of people and then matching them with names and then following that up by following people’s social media. People’s phones were tapped. All of these different types of surveillance that we expect to be used in an antiterrorist way were being used against Black Lives Matter movement folks.
What the unit is actually called is a cyber-unit. It’s one that isn’t talked about a lot. We were able to get information through our workings and our investigation about this cyber-unit and began to press the City Attorney’s Office through the discovery process and also using sort of the Freedom of Information Act, Public Information Act rules to get information that was being held in the cyber-unit. There’s a lot we were not able to get, because the city attorney just denied that they existed, even though we know that it did. But we were able to get enough to know and to see that this was the format in which they had engaged. Some of the photos they gave us had people’s names right above their heads. And the way that the people’s names were, were the same type of way, in terms of the printing, that we see in surveillance photos with the feds, but this was being done by LAPD. So it’s very interesting to see that beyond the headlines.
Some of the activists who are on trial had letters sent to their employers.
That was a different set of activists, different folks, who were arrested. They weren’t put on trial. But they actually had letters. I started getting calls, and this is from the December 2015 action that occurred on the 405 freeway near the airport. I started getting calls from people that they were getting letters to their employer that were being sent by the DOJ and the LAPD. And those letters were going directly to their supervisors, saying, “Hey, this person has been arrested for the crime of felony conspiracy to commit any charge.”
They’re not convicted. They are arrested.
These letters, according to the letters themselves, they were either sent by the DOJ or LAPD. We are certain they were sent by LAPD. The Department of Justice of the state of California, this is not what they’re doing. This is an LAPD thing. And they sent—now, these folks weren’t even charged. We’re talking about they’re not even having cases against them in court. Just based on their arrest, we had a person who was headed to Canada, who was sent back and told—deported—at the border, “You can’t come in here because you have these charges pending against you,” when that clearly was not the case, but it’s being written up purposefully and intentionally to mar any people who are associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.
The prosecutor in the case is Jennifer Wexler.
she describes herself as a political prosecutor. She is one who prosecuted Occupy Los Angeles members who were arrested. If you look her up, there are vociferous blogs talking about the tactics that she engaged in, the city attorney engaged in. And that—those tactics were used again here with Black Lives Matter. Just as an example, her offers, in terms of plea offers, all included jail time and a “no unlawful protesting” clause. Now, I pointed out to her, in open court and to the judge, that I find that to be completely unconstitutional. I don’t know what that means, “no unlawful protesting.” Protesting is a First Amendment right in this country. And she, you know, looked over and said, “Oh, well. That’s what they’d have to plead to.” And so, obviously, we were not going to plead to that.
The jury in the case—we were in East L.A. The jury was mainly Chicanx and Southeast Asians; you had a couple of whites, no black folks at all. In a jury pool of a hundred people, there were maybe four black people. Most of those people, when they came up for jury selection, were not selected, were eliminated. And there was even a motion that was done with respect to the elimination of the black jurors. The jurors were mainly working-class. And I think that a lot of our success in this case came about because the jurors understood what we were saying when we got up—when I got up and said, “Hey, we need to be on the right side of history, the right side of justice, as well as the right side of the law.”
in November of 2014, there are just two charges: obstruction, willfully and maliciously obstructing a freeway, and refusing the lawful order of an officer. They were misdemeanor charges. With the second freeway action that occurred in December of 2015, obviously, the CHP decided to kick it up a notch, and so they charged folks with felonies when they arrested them.
Black Lives Matter-L.A. is looking into. Wakiesha Wilson was in LAPD custody on March 27th, when authorities say they found her hanging in her cell. Wilson died at a hospital an hour later. Wakiesha Wilson’s mother, Lisa Hines, did not learn about her daughter’s death until days later, when Wilson did not show up in court.
Lisa Hines, her mother, “That was my only child. All I want to know is what happened, because I know she didn’t take her life. She had too much to live for. She was coming home, she told me, to be in court. She was calling me back later that evening. I waited and I waited for that call, and it never happened.”
This was at an LAPD detention center. So it’s really important that we understand what this case is and what happened to Wakiesha, what probably happened to Wakiesha Wilson. There was a documented conflict between her and a guard shortly before she was found dead. The family says that she was not suicidal at all. They had just spoken with her. It was Easter Sunday. And then they took four days. And in fact, it was only after the mother begins to look for her, when she doesn’t show up in court, that they find that she was in fact dead. She was a mother of a 13-year-old boy. She’s somebody’s daughter. And, you know, she is our Sandra Bland that’s emerging here in Los Angeles.
I think it’s very important that there is an investigation, that there’s an independent investigation, that it’s not just an LAPD investigation, and that the city of Los Angeles put the money behind doing that. You can think about how much money was spent on the cases that we—the case we just talked about with the six, and you think about them thinking about trying these cases again? That monies that are going to that, those tens of thousands of dollars, should be going to find out who killed Wakiesha Wilson and to prosecute those people.
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Nana Gyamfi
criminal defense and human rights attorney who represents Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles. She is a professor of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles. She represents six Black Lives Matter activists on trial in Los Angeles for blocking the 101 freeway in November 2014.
Melina Abdullah
organizer with Black Lives Matter. She is also a professor and chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles.
— source democracynow.org