Thursday, August 7, 2008 – A Demonstration

It's hard to guess what the rest of America thinks of Los Angeles – perhaps to them it is just a place full of surfer dudes and movie stars and their agents, with a sprinkling of Valley Girls.  But it is also full of people passionate about public policy, beyond the new ban on plastic shopping bags. They want to be heard. Here you have "Victims' Families Gather to Support Jamiel's Law against Sanctuary City Policies" – a press event in front of City Councilman Jack Weiss’s West LA office, Thursday, August 7, 2008 - 822 South Robertson Boulevard, at the edge of Los Angeles. The east side of the street is Los Angeles, and the west side is Beverly Hills.

Just a few blocks up Robertson Boulevard is the Ivy – where the stars do lunch – and the exclusive shops where Britney Spears buys whatever she seems to want, dodging the paparazzi.

But this is the serious stuff – read about the issues here.  It comes down to whether we should force the Los Angeles Police Department to act as immigration agents and hold those who are here illegally.  The LAPD recently released a young man, Pedro Espinoza, as they didn't have enough evidence of any crime, and the next day he shot and killed a young man named Jamiel – for no particular reason.  Had the LAPD checked Espinoza's immigration status, they would have discovered he was an illegal alien – and if they had been tasked with enforcing immigration law, they would have had to have held him for the feds, and Jamiel would not be dead.

The LAPD doesn't particularly want to be doing immigration enforcement – they have enough on their hands as it is – but the local talk radio station, KABC, has made this their cause, as has Fox News nationally. This event was organized by KABC and their morning host, Doug McIntyre. You see him the pictures – and a fellow from the local Fox News television station interviewing the victim's mother.

This is the serious side of Los Angeles.

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Technical Note:

Photographs after March 3, 2008, were taken with a Nikon D200 – or a Nikon D70 when noted. All previous photographs were taken with the D70. The lenses used are (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300 mm telephoto, or (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. Photography here is modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  The earliest photography in the archives was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik