LA Police Union Makes Weak Defense For Officers In Keenan Anderson Incident

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Every year this behav­ior gets worse than the pre­vi­ous year. Police con­tin­ue to mur­der the inno­cent, men­tal­ly dis­tressed, and unarmed at alarm­ing rates with­out any seri­ous attempt to rein in this mur­der­ous rampage.


Lawyer Carl Douglas, far left, holds a news con­fer­ence to announce fil­ing a $50 mil­lion in dam­ages claim against the city of Los Angeles over the death of Keenan Anderson, seen pic­tured on posters, in Los Angeles Friday, Jan. 20, 2023.

As expect­ed, a police union has entered from stage right to defend the actions of their offi­cers this month. The Los Angeles Police Department became the cen­ter of con­tro­ver­sy fol­low­ing the viral arrest of BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors’ cousin Keenan Anderson, who died fol­low­ing the traf­fic stop. Now, they’re under scruti­ny from the pub­lic giv­en Anderson’s death was spec­u­lat­ed to be the third traf­fic stop by the LAPD that turned fatal this year (and we’re only in January). The LAPD Shootings and Critical Incidents web­site has not doc­u­ment­ed the inci­dents, includ­ing Anderson’s.

According to an ABC7 report, the Los Angeles Police Protective League made a state­ment on the two men who were shot and Anderson who was Tased. The report says all three men were suf­fer­ing from men­tal ill­ness and instead of the LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit being called, the cops respond­ed. Even Police Chief Michel Moore was con­cerned about it.

In a five-page waste of time, writ­ten to the may­or and city coun­cil, the LAPPL defend­ed the offi­cers and point­ed toward the MEU’s lack of resources as rea­son for the fatal out­come of each case.

More from ABC7 Los Angeles:

But police union offi­cials say the offi­cers did noth­ing wrong and that the out­comes of the three cas­es would not have been dif­fer­ent had men­tal health eval­u­a­tors been sum­moned, since those eval­u­a­tors are not allowed to inter­act with vio­lent sus­pects until armed offi­cers are able to secure the scene and make sure there are no threats.

In all three inci­dents that we talked about today, noth­ing would have changed if an MEU unit was at the scene,” said Detective Jamie McBride, the LAPPL Board Director. “In any of these inci­dents, they have to be ren­dered safe first before a men­tal eval­u­a­tion unit can come up.”

McBride says LAPD’s poli­cies and pro­to­cols are clear: It’s Mental Evaluation Units and Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Teams, known as SMART, are clas­si­fied as sec­ond responders.

Well, the offi­cers involved in Anderson’s case will be eval­u­at­ed on just how well they fol­lowed pro­to­col on both state and fed­er­al lev­els.

Attorney Benjamin Crump and O.J. Simpson’s for­mer defense attor­ney Carl Douglas announced the fil­ing of a wrong­ful death claim, seek­ing $50 mil­lion in dam­ages, Friday. The claim was filed on behalf of Anderson’s 5‑year-old son, per the LA Times.

Mr. Anderson did noth­ing to jus­ti­fy this use of seri­ous and unrea­son­able force against him.… The Claimants are informed and believe that because of implic­it bias, each of the unknown involved police offi­cers assumed Mr. Anderson pre­sent­ed a seri­ous threat to someone’s safe­ty, and then assault­ed, bat­tered and tased him at least six times in response.,” read the claim. “- the City of Los Angeles neg­li­gent­ly trained these police offi­cers as to the appro­pri­ate cir­cum­stances and tech­niques to deploy when using non­lethal force, includ­ing tasers, lead­ing to the actions and fail­ures to act as alleged here.”