The Thorn West is a state and local news roundup compiled by members of DSA-LA. Our goal is to provide a weekly update on the latest developments in state and local politics, and to track the issues that are most important to our membership.
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Issue No. 9 - May 8, 2020
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- After renewed national outcry, a white father and son in Georgia have been arrested and charged with murder and aggravated assault in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man. Arbery was jogging in his neighborhood when he was confronted and killed in what Arbery’s father and others have called a modern-day lynching. A newly released video shows Gregory McMichael and his son Travis waiting with guns in a pickup truck blocking the road when Arbery approached, and they immediately attacked him as he tried to avoid them. The shooting occurred on February 23, but no charges were initially brought, with the first assigned prosecutor recusing herself due to McMichael being a former employee of her office. The second prosecutor also recused himself, after a month on the case, due to a complaint by Arbery’s family that his son worked in the prosecutor’s office where McMichael used to work. Prior to his recusal, the second prosecutor sent a letter to the police department saying there was insufficient probable cause for an arrest. The killing of Arbery occurred just three days prior to the eighth anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death.
- The US food supply system has been upended by the Coronavirus as huge shifts have resulted in a massive increase in food bank use at the same time that produce rots in fields and meat processing plants close. The existing system that linked farmers, meat processors, truckers, food distributors, restaurants, grocers and food banks collapsed when restaurants were forced to close, which sharply decreased overall demand. Now grocers are passing on less food as they struggle to keep pace with bulk purchases by customers; other sources, such as leftover food from movie productions, have also vanished. The result is desperation, with food distribution points that give directly to hungry Californians seeing their supplies exhausted minutes after opening.
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- Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, a detainee in San Diego, became the first to die of COVID-19 while in ICE custody. His death occurred just one day after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled a US District judge’s ruling to decrease the population at California’s Adelanto ICE processing facility, one of the largest immigrant detention facilities in the country, to a level that would allow the remaining detainees to maintain a social distance of six feet from one another.
- Eduardo Robles-Holguin became the sixth inmate to die from COVID-19 at Terminal Island prison in San Pedro, and family members of inmates took to the streets outside the prison to demand justice and safety for incarcerated people. Terminal Island is the location with the largest outbreak of COVID-19 in the federal prison system, with 620 inmates and 15 staff members infected as of May 5.
- Video footage of an LAPD officer brutally and repeatedly punching a man during an arrest in late April in Boyle Heights has sparked widespread outrage and condemnation, and activists are calling on District Attorney Jackie Lacey to prosecute the officer. The LAPD announced they would conduct an internal review after the video footage spread online this week. The officer has been involved in three prior on-duty shootings.
- DSA-LA’s Street Watch coalition organized with unhoused activist Davon Brown to seize a hotel room in the DTLA Ritz-Carlton and demand that Mayor Garcetti follow through and commandeer empty hotel rooms to provide safe shelter for the unhoused during the pandemic. The Ritz-Carlton gets $270M in taxpayer subsidies and yet at least 900 rooms remain empty. The LA City Council has so far voted only to publicly identify hotels that have refused to take part in Project Roomkey, a joint effort by the state, county and city to shelter the county’s unhoused in vacant hotel rooms. The program, which is restricted to only the elderly and “medically vulnerable,” aims to find rooms for 15,000 of the county's estimated 60,000 unhoused. But as of yet, rooms have been found for only 1,800, the program is voluntary, and some hotels have resisted participating.
- Meanwhile, outside of Los Angeles, several hotels that have willfully participated in Project Roomkey have faced pushback from neighbors and from their own municipal governments. Judges permitted Los Angeles County to issue restraining orders against the cities of Bell Garden and Norwalk, both of which had attempted to prevent hotels from taking part in the program. In Covina, protesters chanting “not in my neighborhood” and “safety first” were ultimately successful in convincing a local hotel owner to back out.
- Rent strikes are spreading in Los Angeles and across the country as economic desperation compounded by the pandemic further worsens the housing crisis and radicalizes tenants. Membership in the LA Tenants Union has more than doubled since the start of the crisis, and most of their now 8000 members participated in a citywide rent strike on May 1. These strikes are estimated to be the largest since the 1930s. According to one estimate, the federal government could expand existing housing subsidy programs to cover all qualified low-income renters and those newly eligible due to the pandemic for just $100 billion a year, a mere fraction of the trillions handed out by Congress to large corporations in the series of bailout bills passed already.
- The LA City Council unanimously passed a measure that will allow tenants to sue landlords who violate the city’s eviction rules for those affected by COVID-19. The measure allows judgments of $10,000–$15,000 to tenants of these “unscrupulous” landlords. Tenants will still be required to pay back all missed rent within a year of the end of the emergency. Council President Nury Martinez presented this measure as the last word on rent relief from the city. “While we have done everything that we can, neither the mayor [nor] the Los Angeles City Council has the legal authority or the financial ability to do more,” she asserted in a speech following Mayor Garcetti's signing of the bill into law.
- Frustrations continue to grow as many more file for unemployment. California’s Employment Development Department says it has processed 3.5 million claims since mid-March. 2.7 million claims have been filed in the last month, and the state has decided to waive certification requirements until further notice. This comes as news breaks today that US unemployment has reached 14.7% and that 20.5 million jobs were lost in April alone.
- Businesses in LA County such as “car dealers and other types of brick-and-mortar stores — including florists and those that sell toys, music, books, clothing and sporting goods” are reopening today with curbside pickup. Officials caution that this is not a return to normal, as LA County accounts for over half of the COVID-19 deaths in California.
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- Ahead of the May 12 special election to replace Katie Hill in Congressional District 25, Democrats argued that black voters are being disenfranchised by the unbalanced placement of voter centers. “Lancaster is the single most diverse part of the district, and yet the nearest voting center is nine miles away,” said LA County Democratic Party Chair Mark J. Gonzalez.
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