A crowd of peaceful protesters on Tuesday that had gathered earlier in the day at LAPD headquarters decried the panel’s decision and quickly moved across the street to City Hall, where activists pounded on glass doors as they were blocked from entering and denounced how police officers used force, particularly against African Americans.
The focus on Redel Jones’ death came at a time of flaring tensions across the country over race and policing. Protesters have marched in cities coast to coast, shutting down freeways in Oakland and Inglewood and packing New York’s Times Square after last week’s fatal police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, and a sniper attack in Dallas that killed five officers.
But it wasn't only last week’s events that drew demonstrators to Tuesday’s L.A. Police Commission meeting. In the year since Jones’ death, activists have chanted her name at the weekly meetings, written it on signs carried at protests and spread it on Twitter as a hashtag.
Jones, who was black, was killed after Los Angeles police say she moved toward an officer while holding a knife. The LAPD said the 30-year-old matched the description of a woman who robbed a nearby pharmacy about 20 minutes earlier, prompting officers to pursue her into the alley.
But a woman who said she saw the August 2015 shooting from her car questioned why police opened fire, telling the Los Angeles Times that Jones was running away from the officers and never turned toward them.
Siding with the police chief, the Police Commission determined in a 3-0 vote that the shooting was justified because an officer could reasonably have believed that Jones’ “actions while armed with a knife presented an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury,” according to a written summary of its findings. The panel and the chief, however, criticized some of the actions of the officers, including their talking to her while sitting in their cars instead of getting out.
The board also noted that the officers initially failed to activate their in-car cameras and didn’t come up with a plan before approaching Jones. It was the first day the two officers had worked together.