Los Angeles County DA’s Husband Points Gun At Black Lives Matter Protester

Maddog wrote:On Monday morning, the activists set up chairs on the sidewalk outside Lacey’s home. Abdullah and two other people went to the front door and rang the doorbell to request that the district attorney meet with them outside her house, ahead of Tuesday’s election. Abdullah, who has met Lacey before, noticed that the house was equipped with a Ring camera, allowing people inside the house to see who was at the door. Abdullah thought she heard a gun being cocked inside the home, but hoped she was being paranoid, she told HuffPost. Then David Lacey, the district attorney’s husband, opened the door, pointed a gun at Abdullah’s chest and told her to leave.

Abdullah posted a 45-second video on Twitter documenting the event, including what she identified as her exchange with David Lacey.


https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jackie-lacey-husband-gun-black-lives-matter_n_5e5d3f36c5b67ed38b36535c?utm_medium=facebook&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063&utm_source=main_fb&utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&fbclid=IwAR3A2XDXG_Tg42OXuibMbWmkpKM0sanM2NRCwtvN43ZNH0MjGIt46gC-Bsk

Video in the link

The man handled it like any self respecting husband should.

You are crossing a line when you come on to mans porch before sun up, with 30 people asking for his wife to come outside.    

Ben Reilly wrote:They have every right to be angry. She's letting killer cops off the hook.

eddie wrote:

Maddog wrote:On Monday morning, the activists set up chairs on the sidewalk outside Lacey’s home. Abdullah and two other people went to the front door and rang the doorbell to request that the district attorney meet with them outside her house, ahead of Tuesday’s election. Abdullah, who has met Lacey before, noticed that the house was equipped with a Ring camera, allowing people inside the house to see who was at the door. Abdullah thought she heard a gun being cocked inside the home, but hoped she was being paranoid, she told HuffPost. Then David Lacey, the district attorney’s husband, opened the door, pointed a gun at Abdullah’s chest and told her to leave.

Abdullah posted a 45-second video on Twitter documenting the event, including what she identified as her exchange with David Lacey.


https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jackie-lacey-husband-gun-black-lives-matter_n_5e5d3f36c5b67ed38b36535c?utm_medium=facebook&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063&utm_source=main_fb&utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&fbclid=IwAR3A2XDXG_Tg42OXuibMbWmkpKM0sanM2NRCwtvN43ZNH0MjGIt46gC-Bsk

Video in the link

The man handled it like any self respecting husband should.

You are crossing a line when you come on to mans porch before sun up, with 30 people asking for his wife to come outside.    

I agree. Of course a man is going to be pissed off if an army of angry people show up at his house threatening his wife. She may well be in the wrong in their eyes (and perhaps morally) but that is entirely an aggressive way to go about it.
Aiming a gun at them is wrong as I don’t believe in guns in the first place but he had every right to be upset and angry and was only protecting his wife.

I’d have got a water hose on them. You cannot be showing up like an angry mob at someone’s house - the time of day doesn’t actually matter in my point of view.

Ben Reilly wrote:She's only prosecuted one police officer when 500 civilians have been killed by police during her term.

But now she's the good guy because people pissed off about this showed up at her house too early.

I say, no, she's not the good guy. If she lost a little sleep, I have to wonder how she sleeps not prosecuting killer cops.

eddie wrote:I’d have got a water hose on them. You cannot be showing up like an angry mob at someone’s house - the time of day doesn’t actually matter in my point of view.

Maddog wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:They have every right to be angry. She's letting killer cops off the hook.

They probably do have some right to be angry.

Do you show up at peoples doors at 5am with 29 friends when you are angry at someone?

Ben Reilly wrote:

Maddog wrote:

They probably do have some right to be angry.

Do you show up at peoples doors at 5am with 29 friends when you are angry at someone?

If they're responsible for armed, uniformed law officers killing hundreds of people with impunity, I'd do a hell of a lot worse.

Basically, the math goes like this: Hundreds of killings > showing up with 29 friends at someone's door early in the morning.

Or as Jesus put it so well: "You blind guides! You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel."

Maddog wrote:So you make a habit of showing up on the doorstep of corrupt government officials?

Maddog wrote:Wonder why the State of California doesn't do something about her?

eddie wrote:I can see why some of you have the opinion that the army had every right to show up at her door, amd perhaps they did.
But her husband had every right to feel fucked off and intimidated and he felt a need to protect his wife.

And that is essentially what the topic is about. People will always want to protect their loved ones whether you like that person or not.

Mother Jones wrote:LA’s First Black District Attorney Is Battling for Reelection. Black Activists Want Her Out.

To top things off, incumbent Jackie Lacey’s biggest opponent is George Gascón—a former cop.

The debate didn’t exactly go as District Attorney Jackie Lacey had planned. Lacey, onstage at the Aratani Theatre in Los Angeles on January 29, struggled to complete a sentence before protesters started yelling again. “Jackie Lacey must go!” they chanted. One 71-year-old man rushed toward the stage after shouting about the more than 500 people who activists say have been killed by law enforcement under Lacey’s tenure. “You were supposed to meet with us six months ago!” he yelled as security dragged him away. A woman with straight black hair rose from her seat demanding justice for her dead son. Security hauled her out of the room, too, along with about a dozen other demonstrators, many of them members of Black Lives Matter.

Lacey, the first African American person and the first woman to become district attorney in Los Angeles, was elected eight years ago with strong backing from communities of color. But since then, she has opposed state reforms to lower the prison population and declined to charge almost all officers accused of fatal shootings. As the LA County district attorney’s primary approaches, tensions have been mounting between her office and Black Lives Matter protesters. To top things off, Lacey faces stiff competition from San Francisco’s former district attorney, George Gascón, as well as reformist darling Rachel Rossi.

Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, described the election as “the single most important DA race in the country.” Los Angeles has the nation’s biggest prosecutor’s office by far, and its biggest jail, making it a top prize for reformists who have launched campaigns from Chicago to Philadelphia to Brooklyn to put progressive lawyers at the head of traditionally tough-on-crime district attorney’s offices. The race is also important for the future of police accountability: Los Angeles sees more fatal officer-involved shootings than just about anywhere else in America. Prosecutors—led by the district attorney—are the ones who decide whether to press charges against cops who kill.

Police shootings have become a focal point of the race. Nationally, it’s extremely rare for prosecutors to charge police who kill. But incumbent district attorneys with poor track records on this issue have lost elections elsewhere in recent years after high-profile shootings of unarmed black teens like Laquan McDonald and Michael Brown. After she declined to charge hundreds of officers, including one who shot a homeless, unarmed black man, Lacey now faces the same threat. “It could be a real liability for her,” says Rachel Barkow, a law professor at NYU who writes about efforts to reform district attorney’s offices. “Jackie Lacey promised reform but has continued…fueling mass incarceration and destroying black and brown communities in Los Angeles,” Cullors tweeted. Lacey counts Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and the local union that represents police officers among her supporters. But she “has run from us at every turn,” says Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA, which does not endorse candidates but has protested outside Lacey’s office for years.

In an unusual twist for an election that hinges on police reform, Gascón, the progressive candidate viewed as Lacey’s biggest challenger, is a white-haired former Los Angeles police officer. Even so, he has support from the LA County Democratic Party, progressive district attorneys like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and BLM’s Cullors, along with Sen. Kamala Harris. Lacey’s second challenger, Rossi, is a public defender who is also endorsed by Cullors and has strong backing by grassroots activists, but she lacks the statewide profile and funding of the other two candidates. The top-two finishers in the March 3 primary will go head-to-head in November, unless one of them receives more than half the total vote.

Gascón, who served for decades as an officer and a police chief, is now pitching himself as one of the country’s most liberal prosecutors on matters of police accountability. And people like Abdullah are paying attention. “We are saying almost anybody would be better than Jackie Lacey,” she says—“including a former cop.”

Lacey has childhood roots in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw neighborhood, near plenty of gang violence. Her dad was a sanitation worker, and her mom worked in a garment factory. Lacey grew to understand why her neighbors distrusted the police: She watched the Watts riots on television when she was eight, along with protests led by Martin Luther King Jr., where officers released attack dogs and fire hoses on black demonstrators. But she also developed a respect for law enforcement, especially after her dad was shot in the leg while mowing the lawn. “People in the community knew, ‘Hey, if something’s going on, call the cops,’” Lacey told the Los Angeles Times in 2016. After law school, she joined the Los Angeles district attorney as a line prosecutor in 1986, working her way up the ranks.

Los Angeles voters elected Lacey as district attorney in 2012, just before the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Many black activists, including Abdullah and others who would later join BLM, hoped Lacey would bring fresh perspective to a district attorney’s office that had been run by men since 1850. Hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs and basketball star Magic Johnson congratulated her, while R&B singer Macy Gray performed at her election night party.

But Lacey’s reluctance to crack down on officers involved in fatal shootings quickly drew criticism from activists. Her standing with Black Lives Matter took a turn for the worse in 2015. A video emerged of a Highway Patrol officer repeatedly punching a mentally ill black woman on a freeway. Lacey’s office found that he was justified in using force to keep her from stepping into traffic. BLM protesters poured in to protest and shut down another freeway in Los Angeles. That year, an LAPD officer also shot and killed an unarmed, black homeless man near the Venice boardwalk; in a highly unusual move, the department’s police chief recommended that Lacey press charges against the officer, but she later decided not to. She said there was not enough evidence to prove he violated the law, which was weighted heavily in favor of police.

Protesters say Lacey ran from them or pushed them away after shootings, rather than hearing them out. In 2016, Black Lives Matter collected hundreds of signatures urging Lacey to prosecute the officers who fired 20 rounds into Kisha Michael, 31, and her boyfriend as they appeared to sleep inside a parked Chevy Malibu. But when the activists brought the signatures to Lacey’s office, security officers blocked them from entering, says Abdullah, one of the organizers. (Lacey’s campaign still hasn’t responded to my request for comment about the incident or answered any other questions.)

“You’re a race traitor,” one woman yelled to Lacey at a 2016 town hall.

The relationship continued to sour. At a town hall that October, people shouted at Lacey as she tried to speak to a crowd of activists and victims’ family members in a community center. “You’re a race traitor,” a woman yelled, as reported in the San Diego Union-Tribune. “You help killer cops!” others chanted. When Lacey said she could understand their anger, a boy screamed, “No, you don’t!” Her voice became quieter. “I’m just one woman who’s trying to follow the law, who’s trying to listen, who’s trying to do the right thing,” she said. But as the boos continued, she folded her arms across her chest, told the audience it was being “patronizing and insulting,” and walked out of the room.

Lacey was reelected the next month without a challenger and survived a recall attempt in 2017. But the protesters did not let up. Some went to her home and used a projector to beam the words “Jackie Lacey Must Go” onto her garage door. (The phrase also became a hashtag on Twitter.) She made plans for another town hall in early 2018, but when the time came, she didn’t show. By the middle of that year, Los Angeles law enforcement officers were involved in their 1,500th shooting since 2000. None of them had ever been prosecuted. “She is dismissing her constituency,” says Akili, the 71-year-old Black Lives Matter activist who rushed to the stage at the January debate and goes by his last name. “If you don’t take no action,” he told me, referring to Lacey, “then the assumption is you can kill us, for whatever reason, and it’s okay.”

Lacey finally took a stand in December 2018. She filed manslaughter charges against a sheriff’s deputy who had approached a car he believed was stolen and fired at the driver pulling away. “We believe the officer’s use of deadly force was unjustified and unreasonable under the circumstances,” she said when she announced charges. But it was not enough for some Black Lives Matter activists, who remembered the hundreds of other cases she dismissed. “We really tried to get her to help us understand what barriers there were” to prosecuting police, Abdullah says. “And then when nothing happened, when we’re getting into hundreds of murders and she’s not prosecuting, then we recognized it’s not just a matter of limitations; it’s a matter of her unwillingness.”

Helen Jones, the woman who was escorted out of the January debate by security, and another Black Lives Matter member, says she has been protesting outside Lacey’s office for over two years now. “She just ignored us.”