Chanting “no justice, no peace,” around 200 demonstrators marched along Crenshaw Boulevard Oct. 22 to call for an end to what they saw as acts of police violence against Black and Latino communities here and throughout the nation.

The 14th annual Oct. 22 National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation, gathered at Crenshaw and Florence Avenue in Inglewood, and ended with a rally and a vigil at Leimert Park.

Known collectively as the October 22nd Coalition, the march featured a number of groups including the Youth Justice Coalition, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, militant group The Black Riders and Homies Unidos.

Family members and friends of victims of police involved shootings, such as Christian Portillo, Carlos Rivera, Deondre Brunston and Marcus Smith, whose pictures were prominently displaced on the side of a truck at the head of the march, were also in the crowd.

“I’m here because my fiancé [Smith] was murdered by the Inglewood Police Department on May 17,” said Kalonna LaCount, who attended the protest with her three daughters, Mah’ky, Marquia and Makayla.

“The protest is telling L.A. that we don’t want to have any more murders, by the police or anybody else. We want peace.”

In voicing this year’s theme, “It’s Up to Us,!” coalition spokesman Aidge Patterson, a local hip-hop artist, stressed that the entire community needed to rise up and lead the movement to “stop police brutality.”

“All parts of L.A., the county, the state and the world are represented here today and this is the kind of change that is going to make this happen,” he said.
“When you think of what we represent; of people who have been beaten up, locked up and killed, we are a strong, powerful voice that can make change in this country and on this planet.”

Recalling the revolutionary fervor of Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, a speaker who gave his name as "Che" for 'The Black Riders,' who according to Patterson are a militant group not affiliated to the New Black Panthers, ignited the crowd.

“We can talk all day, politicize, march with banners, try to depend on laws and legislation, but the only true liberation is armed self-defense,” he said.

“Because they are gonna keep killing y’all and so I challenge y’all to start a watch-the-pig program in every L.A. Black and Brown neighborhood and let them know that we’re not afraid to die.”

Peter Bibring, a lawyer for the ACLU, drew a disturbing correlation between the high number of alleged racial profiling incidents suffered by the Black and Latino community.

“When we’re talking about racial profiling, we don’t just mean getting stopped while Black or Brown,” said Bibring.

“It’s what happens after that, people getting pulled out of cars, frisked and searched in situations that would not happen if it were a White person.”

He added: “Last fall, the ACLU published data from the LAPD about its stops record for the whole year, nearly 800,000 of them. The police wrote down who was stopped, where, what race they were, the reason for the stop and whether the person was frisked or searched.

“African-Americans were stopped nearly three times as often as White people and were two and a half more times as likely to be ordered out of the car and frisked and twice as likely to be asked to allow a consensual search.”

Yet, Bibring added, those searches were not as productive for Whites and were nearly 30 percent less likely to yield evidence of a weapon or drugs of any kind.

“This is not a problem we can allow to exist,” he concluded. “They can try to take steps with training or mediation, but that doesn’t justify these kinds of discriminations and disparities from existing. And it’s not just the LAPD, it’s other departments, the Sheriff and Inglewood Police. [So] if they are discriminating in their stops and searches, it goes a little bit of the way to show why police violence impacts people of color.”

In her remarks, Amina Kazi, deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, claimed the Muslim community had officially “joined the club.”

“That is the club of communities judged by their race, the way they look, their ideologies, their political speech and treated as suspects by this,” said Kazi.
“What we’re fighting for today is not just for the Muslim community, but all communities of color and consciousness and that’s why we need to continue to work together and build bridges.”

Finally, Jaron Thompson, the nephew of Marcus Smith, summed up the mood when he asked “when is it going to stop?”

“Marcus was brutally murdered by the Inglewood Police Department and shot 22 times in the back,” he said.

“They yelled out he had a gun, but there were lots of eye-witnesses. ... He never had a gun. We need to let the cops know it has to stop.”