Video has begun to spread around the internets purportedly showing LA County, California law enforcement training their guns (including what appears to be an assault rifle) on three Black teenagers while bystanders plead with police, telling them that they are threatening the wrong people. In the video, which takes place in Santa Clarita, about 30 miles outside of Los Angeles, a law enforcement officer can be seen telling the crowd gathered to back up while he holds his rifle trained on teens standing at a bus stop. The teens have their hands up, and one teen has been moved to his knees in front of the police car.
Most striking is that more than a handful of onlookers plead with law enforcement to put down their guns, telling them they have the whole thing mixed up. TMZ reports that a mother of one of the teens told the outlet that the kids were sitting at a bus stop when an unhoused individual came up to them asking for drugs and then getting very aggressive, pulling off his shirt and attacking them with a knife. The kids reportedly fended their attacker off with their skateboards. The LA County Sheriff's Dept. told TMZ that the reason the police were treating the teens this way was because they were responding to a call of “2 adult males hitting another man with a skateboard.” The deadly weapon that the police were training multiple guns on the kids for was their skateboard.
To be clear, the LA County Sheriff’s Department statement only satisfies the explanation of why they were initially treating the teens as suspects and not victims. It does not explain why Rambo and team decided to load up the threat of obliteration.
An unarmed Breonna Taylor was shot eight times and killed by police on March 13, in her own home, after she was awoken by law enforcement crashing through her front door. Not a single charge has been filed against any of the officers involved.
