Mayor Eric Garcetti met Thursday with Black Lives Matter activists who have been calling for the dismissal of police Chief Charlie Beck and two officers involved in last year’s fatal shooting of Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old unarmed black man.
Garcetti declined to comment following the meeting at Holman United Methodist Church in the Jefferson Park area.
Black Lives Matter member Melina Abdullah said they made “three immediate demands.”
They include “the firing of Chief Beck, a reparations policy in the city of Los Angeles and open meetings for the Police Commission, and a tighter engagement with a Police Commission that really represents the concerns of black Los Angeles,” she said.
Black Lives Matter members have sought repeatedly to meet with the mayor — going so far as to camp overnight outside his house in Windsor Square — ever since the Los Angeles Police Commission determined last month that one of the officers who shot Ford acted improperly, disagreeing with Beck’s assessment.
After failing to gain a meeting initially, the group began attending the mayor’s public events, which resulted in two Black Lives Matter activists being arrested following a confrontation with police.
Black Lives Matter members have said they want the two officers involved in shooting Ford to be fired, and if that does not happen, they are also calling for Beck to be fired.
Since last month’s Police Commission decision on the police shooting of Ford on Aug. 11, 2014, Beck has announced that he is retraining all Los Angeles police officers in techniques to de-escalate potentially violent confrontations, along with ways to dealing with the mentally ill and the homeless.
