If you’re keeping score in Los Angeles this week, it’s one and one. The city’s Police Commission decided on Tuesday that five officers all acted within policy when they shot and killed a homeless man in the city’s Skid Row district last March. Video of that shooting went viral and ignited protests in the city already under fire for recent police killings. The controversy overshadowed another police shooting of an unarmed individual approximately four days later following a car chase into the city of Burbank. Commission members ruled that shooting was out of policy, agreeing with police chief Charlie Beck.
Advocates for the homeless as well as Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles and others condemned both the shooting of Charly Leundeu Keunang, a Cameroonian immigrant, as well as the decision to exonerate the officers who shot him. Shaun King wrote extensively on the case at the time, you can see his reports here and here.
Officers were called to Skid Row to investigate a robbery on March 1. It is unclear what led them to Keunang in the first place but attempts to question Keunang did not go well. Keunang went inside of his tent—most of the homeless on skid row have tents or “cardboard cities” where they sleep at night—and at least one officer deployed a taser on him inside the tent. Keunang emerged from the tent where a struggle ensued. During the struggle a rookie officer assigned to skid row said Keunang grabbed his holstered service weapon. According to the L.A. Times, “the commission concluded that the use of deadly force was within policy, [but] the panel found that the rookie officer's tactics were not.”
On March 5 Sergio Navas was driving a vehicle erratically in North Hollywood. Officers noted the vehicle had improper license plates, and a check revealed that the car was stolen. Officers attempted to pull the car over, they said, but Navas sped off. The ensuing car chases ended in Burbank where both vehicles collided with one another. Navas and an officer were facing each other as their vehicles sat side by side. The officer says he feared that Navas was reaching for a weapon to shoot him at such close range so he opened fire. LAPD Chief Beck said, and the Commission agreed, that the officer did not act reasonably in this situation. Both the shooter and the driver of the police vehicle were faulted for their tactics.
Both the families of Keunang and Navas have filed wrongful death lawsuits against the city of Los Angeles.