LAPD's tragic fatal shooting of an unarmed suspect and a 14-year-old bystander at Burlington Coat Factory in North Hollywood has grabbed national headlines, shaking the nation. While responding to an assault at the store, LAPD rushed into a store that hadn't been evacuated and opened fire on an unarmed suspect. Not only was the suspect killed, but so was a 14-year-old bystander named Valentina Orellana-Peralta, who was in the changing room behind the suspect, with her mother. She died in her mother's arms. With such a horrific and high profile shooting, transparency is vital. Which is why many residents of Los Angeles sounded the alarm when LAPD North Hollywood Division, the station responsible for the shooting, made the unprecedented decision to delete their entire Twitter account on Tuesday evening. The official account was tagged by the primary LAPD account as recently as Christmas Eve.
Following a press conference from the parents of Valentina Orellana-Peralta and civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump (who represented the families of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd), LAPD told Spectrum One journalist Kate Cagle that the department no longer had media availability. This secrecy is a major betrayal of public trust.
Former San Francisco Police Commissioner John Hamasaki said that he had never seen an entire division's social media account shut down and scrubbed. He added, in a post on social media, "in the criminal law world we call this consciousness of guilt."
Some activists are even suggesting that this amounts to destruction of evidence and/or public records.
Why is this station deleting an entire official government Twitter account? Why does the entire department no longer have any media availability?
How can we trust that this incident will be adequately investigated when the public is already being kept in the dark in such a severe and active way?