The response by Chief Charlie Beck and Dodger owner Frank McCourt to the brutal beating of Bryan Stow didn't particularly sit well with Jack Dunphy, the pseudonym of the active LAPD officer who writes a police blog at Pajamas Media.
In his April 12 post, "Gangland Violence Comes to Dodger Stadium," Dunphy compared the incident to the fatal shooting of 27-year-old graphic artist Karen Toshima in Westwood in 1988. Toshima was a bystander hit by a stray gang bullet.
Dunphy writes:
That bullet didn't just kill Karen Toshima; it killed Westwood Village. Though gang violence had been on the rise in Los Angeles for years, for most people in the city it remained little more than an abstraction, something that only occurred "down there" and among "those people." But with Toshima's murder that violence escaped the rough neighborhoods where it could be easily ignored by the city's elites. Suddenly even Westwood Village, in the very center of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, was regarded as unsafe. It wasn't long before the once-thriving Village became, if not quite a ghost town, a place to be avoided. And even now, 23 years later, the vacant storefronts along Westwood Boulevard offer testimony that it has yet to fully recover.
Dunphy wonders if the same could happen to Dodger Stadium following the beating by gang thugs of Giants fan Bryan Stow, who is now in a medically induced coma with brain damage.
Chief Beck's admonitions to behave and McCourt's hiring of former Chief William Bratton won't cut it. Officers must make Latino gang members the focus of their efforts, even if it risks political incorrectness, Dunphy adds:
If Charlie Beck and Frank McCourt ... will not admit such a politically incorrect thought in public, of course, but they will rely on LAPD officers to stand up to the challenge posed by these gangsters and reclaim the stadium from them even as the hoodlums squeal about being "harassed" and "profiled." Every police contact in the grandstand and in the parking lot will be recorded on cell phone cameras and presented as evidence that the police are unfairly singling out Latinos, claims that the local media will exuberantly repeat and endorse.
Read Dunphy's full post at PajamasMedia.com.
Related:
