“Why Young People Increasingly Say ACAB" by Daniel Guss
Stylish merch and insular, politicized law enforcement is how LAPD loses youth branding war, its officers and the future.
@TheGussReport on Twitter - Last week, a posse of LAPD officers entered a condominium in my neighborhood with shotguns in response to a 911 domestic violence call. The accused was hauled out in handcuffs, as you or I would have been under those circumstances, and taken to jail for the legal system to process. The LAPD’s Public Information Officer on-duty at the time, and in the days since then, refused to respond to my media inquiries about the incident.
Little doubt that the LAPD’s passive-aggressive non-response is due to its embarrassment, and perhaps feeling cornered, by my two columns last week. They detailed how it and the LAFD covered-up disturbing recordings of 2021 domestic violence and murder/suicide threats by LAFD Deputy Chief Kristina “Kady” Kepner against her then-live-in-love-interest and, in a separate but alleged incident, against current squeeze, LAPD Detective Scarlett Martinez. All three are women.
That’s the last thing that the LAPD needed in a week when it also shockingly released photos and information about virtually all of its officers that wound-up on an anti-police website allegedly encouraging violence against law enforcement. While there are pending legal actions to remove that website from the internet, the photos and data have been repeatedly reproduced. (Reminds me of the times that the LAPD maliciously misused my personal information, lost two lawsuits but has yet to apologize. Neither has a Deputy City Attorney named Jonathan Peralta Bislig, who was eventually reprimanded by the State Bar of California with a warning letter.)
Ironically, I am pro-law enforcement (if it stays in its lane), but experienced enough to know, that the LAPD continually abuses its power, is comfortable lying to cover its arse or meet a political agenda and has as much potential for bad as it does for good. #RodneyKing #PhilVanatter #DarylGates #StephanieLazarus, and so on, and so forth.
If you aren’t familiar with Lazarus, pull-up a 2019 Dateline NBC episode about the former LAPD Detective now doing life in prison for first degree murder, but who first got away with it for 23 years because the LAPD ignored pleas from her victim’s family that she should be investigated.
Sound familiar? At least one of Kepner’s victims feels that she, too, was ignored by a rigged, inside investigation instead of an independent one conducted by a third party. To date, the LAFD never interviewed her about Kepner.
My question that the LAPD keeps dodging is, if it had enough evidence to make a criminal referral against Kepner to the District Attorney in at least one of the domestic violence cases, why did it not slap handcuffs on her, and arrest, book and jail her, as they did to the guy they busted in my neighborhood, and as it would have done to you or me?
Anti-LAPD Sentiment is as easy as 1312 (or ACAB)
Recently, I saw a fit young woman in her 20s wearing a blue bucket hat with the world famous Dodgers “LA” logo. But as I drove past her, I saw additional lettering of “CAB,” to read LA/ACAB, which is a youth pop culture mash-up of LA and the acronym ACAB, which in youth parlance means All Cops Are Bastards or All Cops Are Bad.
I later realized that the young woman is an acquaintance and neighbor from around the bend. She is a thoughtful, trustworthy and clean-living 25-year-old personal trainer who regularly volunteers for charities and hails from one of the most conservative places in the United States.
Yet she has an unshakeable distrust of the LAPD.
Sure, you can say young people coming into their own have always distrusted authority, especially law enforcement, and cite old LAPD pop culture TV shows like Dragnet and Adam-12 as proof that the hippies have always distrusted the fuzz.
Except, in real life, like during the OJ Simpson case, the Rampart scandal and beyond, the LAPD really does the underhanded and criminal things many people allege. That’s why law enforcement agencies from LA to New York are losing young people, especially in branding, with other stylish anti-cop sentiment like 1312, which is the alphabetical order of the letters A, C, A and B.
Peruse digital design marketplaces like Etsy to see how much anti-cop merchandise is available. Then head over to a local skateboard park and see whether the kids, including really young ones, wear it or pro-cop, blue lives matter gear and tell me why the LAPD keeps losing the trust of those it needs to win over the most. Another example: when there are police chases on TV in the warmer weather, and kids in their teens and 20s race out to the corner, do they ever root for the cops? No. In fact, they give bottled water to the perps and sometimes even give cover to help their pals avoid arrest.
That goes double for kids in poorer communities with even deeper distrust of law enforcement. This is part of the reason why cops in LA, New York and everywhere in-between are quitting the gig in record numbers.
Maybe there’s hope for the LAPD as it finally admitted a mistake, albeit a small one.
Toward the end of the LAPD’s really bad week last week, it ran with a really ill-conceived idea; a Twitter poll that asked, “Would you like to see more, less, or the same number of officers patrolling your area?”
Consistent with my pro-law enforcement views, I voted more.
Even though the poll went to the LAPD’s 238,500 Twitter follows, and hundreds of thousands more followers of its divisional Twitter accounts plus anyone else who may have seen the poll, the results were probably not as the LAPD expected.
Seventy-eight percent voted less, causing the LAPD to delete the poll and Tweet, but not before William Gude, one of its higher profile activist/critics with an impressive 38,600 followers of his own @FilmThePoliceLA, grabbed a screenshot and asked a question with an obvious answer: “If the polling results were reversed, would the LAPD have deleted their Twitter poll?”
Of course it would not have deleted it.
Captain Kelly Muniz of the LAPD’s Media Relations Division responded to Gude with a less provable answer. “All of the polls were taken down as we discovered they presented an appearance of manipulation. These polls can be manipulated to counter information known to be true and verified by reputable third party scientific polling.”
When I reached out to Muniz with questions of my own, she could provide no evidence of manipulation and was unable to provide the reputable third party scientific polling. She could only point to a survey about which the LA Times wrote last year with a title that speaks for itself: “Confidence in LAPD drops sharply, poll finds, but L.A. voters don’t want to shrink force.”
That’s not exactly a headline for the LAPD to cheer.
Muniz also misleadingly represented what the U.C. Berkeley/LA Times poll in the Times’ column shows, telling me, “The LA Times reported voters wanting the size of the LAPD to increase.”
Not exactly. While 47% of the public favors a bigger LAPD, a majority of the public, 53%, feels differently. A plurality is good, but a majority remains concerned and may wonder whether the LAPD is the best, not just the biggest, that it should be.
On the bright side, when I asked Muniz why it ran a disastrous and unscientific Twitter poll only to subsequently tout the greater reliability of scientific polling, I got the first honest reply from the LAPD in a long while.
“We should not have,” Muniz said.
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(Daniel Guss, MBA, was nominated for three 2022 LA Press Club awards and was a runner-up in 2021 and 2020. He is City Editor for the Mayor Sam network, and has been a featured contributor for CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)