Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell was in the hot seat during Tuesday’s City Council meeting as a fifth day of protests unfolded in downtown L.A.
Numerous family members of the dozens of people detained by ICE last week have said they felt L.A.’s sanctuary city policies failed them. McDonnell said the LAPD doesn’t assist in federal immigration operations – but they will respond when federal agencies call them for help, for instance, when an officer is down or under attack.
“Generally when somebody puts out a help call, anybody who's in the area at all basically drops what they're doing if that's feasible and gets to the help call to render assistance,” he said. “That is something to us that is sacred.”
That answer didn’t sit well with Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, who brought up the widely seen video of an Australian TV reporter being hit by a rubber bullet.
“To see a reporter get shot with a rubber bullet, what appeared to be, on live television does not add to the de-escalation,” he said. “We have to be mindful of the tactics that are being used by some LAPD members that is adding to the escalation, because that is taking away from the goal of keeping families together.”
Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said she was concerned that the LAPD's response could result in more lawsuits against the city, which is already facing budget problems due to hundreds of millions in previous settlements. She grilled McDonnell on whether the officers on the ground had been properly trained in crowd control.
"I don't want us to be further down the line with more liability payouts because we weren't being thoughtful about who we're putting there," she said.
Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson asked McDonnell to stop referring to ICE agents as “law enforcement partners.”
“If we know somebody's coming here to do warrantless abductions of the residents of this city, those people aren't our partners,” he said.
He also objected to McDonnell referring to the looters who vandalized downtown L.A. businesses on Monday night as “protesters.”
“Sommeone at midnight running around looting, even though there was a protest earlier, that person's not a protester, that person's a looter, that person's a criminal,” he said. “I have a lot of difficulty with those people being referred to as protesters because they're not, any more than they’re Dodger fans when this happens after the Dodger parade. We don’t say, ‘Dodger fans burned down a building.’ We say, ‘criminals burned a building.’”
Since the start of the protests, Chief McDonnell said the LAPD has made 114 arrests, most of them for failure to disperse.
Follow KNX News 97.1 FM
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok