Scenes from the streets

People took to the streets in Los Angeles Friday and over the weekend following the release of the horrific video showing police beating 29-year-old Tyre Nichols. Annenberg Media was there to document what happened at numerous protests, and the Activism desk has been tracking police killings and the movement for change for months.

What follows is a photo essay and details about policing in America.

79 people in 25 days

From January 1st to 25th of 2023, U.S. police killed at least 79 people. Among them were Tyre Nichols (29, Memphis); Manny “Tortuguita” Terán (26, Weelaunee Forest); Keenan Anderson (31, Los Angeles); Oscar Leon Sanchez (35, South LA) and Takar Smith (45, Los Angeles).

In response to these killings, protests erupted in at least 17 cities across the country. At least five were held in Los Angeles – some were vigils, some were riots, and some were marches.

“It can’t be reformed..”

On Friday night, grief and rage were palpable in front of the LAPD HQ. A Black mother took the mic to speak but did not give her name. She explained why she came out, after watching the Tyre Nichols video. “I’m ANGRY. I’m TIRED. I sat there and watched this with my mama, and we cried. Once they put on that badge, it becomes a blue wall of silence.”

“It can’t be reformed,” Verneen Mincey said, at a Black Lives Matter protest on Sunday in Venice. Her brother James Mincey Jr. was killed by LAPD at a traffic stop in 1982. She explained, “Families and mothers are still breathing and crying for the same thing. For justice in a system that does not want to give us justice.”

“It’s shameful that we see our elected officials on national TV talking about what happened to Tyre Nichols, when there’s [so many] people it’s happened to right here in LA…Don’t let our elected officials be silent on that,” a BLM speaker named Auntie Jan said on Sunday.

Since the beginning of 2023, the LAPD has killed at least three people.

Record-breaking deaths, but smaller protests?

In 2022, the U.S. police killed a record-breaking 1176 people.

Despite the outrage in 2020, recent public protest to police brutality has been more quiet.

This decline in public protest may be attributed to a number of reasons:

• Nationwide, police have increased funding to crack down on civil unrest. In Atlanta, the governor of Georgia swiftly activated the National Guard and declared a state of emergency after anti-brutality protests erupted on January 21. In advance of the Tyre Nichols video release, police were similarly on call across the country.
• The officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death were fired, jailed (then let out on bail) and put under investigation. The Scorpion Unit they worked for was disbanded, however other officers from the Scorpion Unit seem to remain employed by the Memphis PD, according to CNN.
• U.S. Government officials, including President Biden, have begged the public to “stay peaceful.” At a press conference in Leimert Park on Friday, Najee Ali, Robert Sausedo, and Lora Dene King collectively asked people to “work together to find solutions,” linking arms with LAPD Deputy Chief Gerald A. Woodyard.
• In some cities, local marches “peace policed” themselves, as activists describe it. In Portland, for example, a group of heavily armed protestors brandished firearms at another group of protestors, in an attempt to deradicalize, control and dictate their response to the injustice.

Managing public response? Or seeking change?

According to Crimethinc, a legacy anarchist publication and “rebel alliance,” responses like President Biden’s are straight out of the “counter-insurgency playbook.” On social media, CrimethInc explained,

“This is how they hope to suppress unrest, even in the most egregious cases of police murder. Even if they fire a few officers, they have no intention of diminishing the amount of violence that police employ, nor addressing the disparities that render that violence inevitable. This is obvious because they are focusing on managing the public response to police violence rather than seeking change.”

L.A.’s largest gathering drew about 300 people Sunday, as per a crowd count by journalist Kelly Stuart. This is a significant downturn from the 2020 George Floyd protests, which lasted weeks and brought thousands to the streets.

Annenberg Media attended two of the protests in L.A. – one on Friday night, at the LAPD HQ, and another on Saturday, at Sunset & Vine. Saturday evening’s march was shut down shortly after helicopters began to circle the premises. LAPD confirmed later via Twitter that three protestors were detained, and one was arrested for felony vandalism.

(Note: We chose photos that did not include protestors’ faces. We also scrubbed the metadata, in order to protect people who chose to take to the streets.)