LOS ANGELES (AP) — For nearly three years, Melina Abdullah has led dozens of demonstrators once a week outside the Hall of Justice to call for the ouster of Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey for failing to prosecute killings by police officers.
Lacey, who got most of her primary support indirectly from police unions, has criticized Gascon for not prosecuting police for shootings during his time as San Francisco DA, though his spokesman, Max Szabo, said none of those cases involved unarmed suspects.
The union representing Los Angeles Police Department officers spent $1 million to torpedo Gascon in the primary as a “con man” and failed leader who fled San Francisco before his term expired.
Lacey has been criticized for not bringing charges in several high-profile police killings of unarmed suspects, including one involving Brendon Glenn, a Black homeless man who had accosted patrons of a bar in Venice and was shot as he struggled with officers who were trying to handcuff him.
Tyrone Howard, an education professor who heads the Black Male Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that given the “long ugly history” LAPD has had with Black and Latino communities, there was hope Lacey would be different from her predecessor, who never charged an officer with an on-duty shooting.