The Brief

The last thing David Ramirez remembers, he was protesting peacefully at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA in the early hours of May 2, 2024.

Then, he said everything seemed to move in slow motion, and there was “nothing but ringing” in his ear.

Listen 24:29

Apple

Spotify

After the George Floyd protests of 2020, California took steps to reign in violent policing of protests by passing laws restricting how law enforcement uses less-lethal weapons, like tasers and rubber bullets. But high profile protests in 2024 and 2025 – including this summer’s protests against the ICE raids in Los Angeles – have revealed major flaws in those laws. LAist Senior Editor Jared Bennett joins us to talk about an investigation around these flaws and what they mean for people exercising their right to free speech.

Why California's protest law is flawed and the consequences to protesters

After the George Floyd protests of 2020, California took steps to reign in violent policing of protests by passing laws restricting how law enforcement uses less-lethal weapons, like tasers and rubber bullets. But high profile protests in 2024 and 2025 – including this summer’s protests against the ICE raids in Los Angeles – have revealed major flaws in those laws. LAist Senior Editor Jared Bennett joins us to talk about an investigation around these flaws and what they mean for people exercising their right to free speech.

Subscribe

• Apple
• Spotify

He’d just been shot in the head with a less-lethal projectile by law enforcement officers while they cleared the encampment. Ramirez described his experience at a news conference this past May.

“My first instinct was to remove the foreign object, but it triggered profuse bleeding,” he said while standing in front of a poster bearing the image of his wound.

In 2021, California lawmakers passed a law that was supposed to prevent injuries like the one Ramirez sustained. The law, Assembly Bill 48, forbids law enforcement from targeting peaceful protesters with chemical agents and less-lethal projectiles like the 40mm kinetic energy projectiles that injured Ramirez. Officers also aren’t supposed to aim less-lethal projectiles at the head.

Ramirez and three other people suing law enforcement over the violent response to the 2024 campus protests say officers with the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol broke state law that day.

The law requires that agencies report on their use of less-lethal weapons and resulting injuries. More than a year later, Ramirez still doesn’t know who fired the projectile that hit him in the head, and neither agency has reported injuring any protesters while clearing the encampment.

Four years after California lawmakers tried to rein in violent policing at protests, Ramirez’s lawsuit and more recent protests against federal immigration raids have put law enforcement’s actions under a microscope and revealed major gaps in enforcement of California’s existing protest laws.

LAist found that hundreds of agencies do not appear to document the use of less-lethal weapons, as required by law. The extent of that documentation varies from agency to agency, making it difficult to hold law enforcement accountable when something goes wrong.

While the California Department of Justice is responsible for posting all such reports on a public website, the agency says it's not responsible for making agencies write the reports or evaluating what’s in them. Compliance with the law is left entirely up to the agencies — some of which told LAist they don’t have staffing or capacity to manage.

Cristina Garcia, a former state Assembly member from Bell Gardens and primary sponsor of Assembly Bill 48, said she and other lawmakers passed the law to protect the rights of Californians, and said it should be up to the DOJ to make sure that’s happening.

“Is this [law] being implemented properly, are we meeting expectations, are we breaking promises? That should be asked of the DOJ,” she said. “If we don’t have enforcement, do we really have a law?”

What the law says

California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 48 after seeing the police response to protests in the summer of 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer.

Still from LAPD body camera footage, showing officer shooting Benjamin Montemayor with a projectile during the protests of 2020.

(

YouTube

/

Courtesy LAPD

)

Under AB 48, officers are only allowed to deploy crowd control tools — including chemical agents or less-lethal projectiles — in response to violence, physical threats or to an “objectively dangerous and unlawful situation.”

The law forbids authorities from aiming at protesters' heads, neck or vital organs, or firing indiscriminately into a crowd.

The same year AB 48 became law in 2021, U.S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall issued a court order placing similar restrictions on the LAPD, specifically.

Civil rights lawyers told LAist in June that the LAPD and other agencies responding to protests that month against federal immigration enforcement appear to have violated this law and the court order. They’ve secured a separate court order forbidding the LAPD from targeting journalists and filed several lawsuits on behalf of protesters.

The law gives agencies 60 days to publish reports about their use of force at protests. The LAPD missed this deadline to report on their response to the protests in June on Aug. 5.

LAPD has not responded to repeated questions about the delayed report.

The LAPD’s website does include reports on previous protests. And the department is among just 32 out of the 624 law enforcement agencies in California that have sent crowd control reports to the California Department of Justice.

LAist reviewed news reports and police documents and found several instances where agencies used less-lethal weapons during protests, yet no crowd control records were posted online as required by state law.

In one instance, an LAPD officer allegedly shot a man in the jaw with a less-lethal projectile on June 8. While LAPD has started conducting an internal investigation into the incident, a report has yet to be generated. It’s been 93 days since the man was shot.

San Francisco police officers fired pepperballs, a form of less-lethal projectile with a chemical irritant, while responding to anti-immigration enforcement protests on June 8, according to news reports. The agency does not appear to file AB 48 reports with the California Department of Justice, and LAist has been unable to locate any such reports on the agency’s website.

The San Francisco Police Department has not yet responded to a request for comment.

In another, UC Riverside PD documented using a less-lethal weapon during a joint response during UC Berkeley’s pro-Palestinian protests in a separate report, yet has not created an AB 48 report for that incident.

UC Riverside Police Lt. Jason Day said his small department didn’t have the capacity to compile the reports.

“A lot of times things are just going to have to get set aside,” he told LAist.

LAPD creates a perimeter to move back anti-ICE protesters on San Pedro Street on June 9, 2025.

(

Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

/

Los Angeles Times

)

Documenting injuries

Civil rights attorneys and experts told LAist that monitoring the use of chemical agents and less-lethal projectiles at protests is important because, despite their name, these weapons are dangerous.

“They absolutely are lethal weapons. They’ve killed people, they've permanently disabled people, caused really significant and substantial injuries to people,” said Rebecca Brown, an attorney who is representing Ramirez and other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against agencies for allegedly misusing less-lethal weapons. “These should not be brought to a protest in the first place.”

Dozens of injuries have been documented by news organizations, on social media and in lawsuits from the May 2 protest where Ramirez was injured.

The LAPD and CHP both filed reports about their use of force at the UCLA protest, but neither documented any injuries as a result of less-lethal weapons.

Carlena Orosco, an assistant professor of criminal justice at California State University, Los Angeles, said the nature of protest response, where multiple agencies often respond to incidents together, makes it difficult to document injuries.

“There are going to be data limitations when it comes to not only identifying categories of injuries, but also ensuring that they are reported comprehensively and accurately… especially when we think of a crowd situation,” she said.

For Brown, law enforcement’s failure to fully document the injuries they cause shows a lack of enforcement.

During the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Brown said “CHP and LAPD did not put any effort into identifying who they hurt, identifying what their injuries were, what kind of treatment they needed.” Without an enforcement mechanism making sure they report injuries, she said law enforcement agencies are “only going to report on that when they have to.”

LAPD has not responded to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the CHP said the agency could not comment due to pending litigation.

Who’s responsible?

Garcia, the former Assemblymember and lead sponsor on Assembly Bill 48, said it should be up to the California Department of Justice to make sure agencies are reporting what they need to comply with the law.

The DOJ doesn’t see it that way. The law requires the department to compile and publish a list of AB 48 webpages from all law enforcement agencies. But according to the DOJ's spokesperson, Elissa Perez, the law doesn’t ask the agency to do anything else by way of enforcement.

“The bill [AB 48] does not include requirements for DOJ to review, audit, or enforce law enforcement agency requirements,” Perez wrote to LAist.

The law also does not outline repercussions for non-compliant agencies.

According to the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, which sets selection and training standards for California law enforcement, agencies are responsible for complying with the law, but there’s no repercussions if they don’t.

“The way the law is written, there is no stated enforcement mechanism,” Meagan Poulos with the commission wrote to LAist in an email. “The individual agencies are responsible.”

Orosco of Cal State LA said while it’s crucial to ensure law enforcement agencies follow the law, it would be difficult for the DOJ to check what is written in the reports filed by individual departments.

“I don't know how they would go about reviewing every department's information,” she said.

Without proactive enforcement of the law, LAist found there are few options for citizens to hold agencies accountable for their use of weapons at protests.

Officers who violate internal department policy can be punished, but those investigations often take years.

Civil lawsuits can also take years and the financial burden ultimately falls to the taxpayer. Los Angeles has so far paid $20 million to resolve lawsuits stemming from the LAPD’s response to protests in 2020.

Garcia said lawsuits like those cost taxpayer dollars and threaten existing services for constituents, so city officials should be interested in making their police departments follow the law.

Five years after Assembly Bill 48 became law, Garcia says proper enforcement requires constant partnership between cities, police departments, the DOJ, the media and constituents.

“Compliance and accountability is a constant, ongoing situation,” she said. “It's never a one-and-done. It's a partnership.”

Watchdog Editor Jared Bennett contributed to this report.

Nearly every pop music holiday song written in the past 80 years owes at least some of its DNA to one Christmas tune in particular: "White Christmas," written by Irving Berlin and sung by Bing Crosby, which he first recorded in 1942.

It's reportedly still one of the best-selling songs of all time in any genre, though chart data from decades ago is unreliable. Even given that murkiness, the Guinness Book of World Records named it as the best-selling physical single of all time in 2012.

"White Christmas" wrote the formula for modern secular holiday songs — despite its complex and troubling history.

Songwriter Irving Berlin wasn't destined to be a Yuletide magic maker. He was born Israel Baline in Siberia to an Orthodox Jewish family; his father was a cantor turned kosher butcher. But Berlin embraced assimilation — he married an Irish Catholic woman and had Christmas trees in his house. Even so, for Berlin, Christmas was a holiday shadowed by personal tragedy.

"On Christmas Day, 1928, his only son died. He always told members of his family that he disliked Christmas for this reason, that he could never, never get past the sadness that he experienced on Christmas Day," said author and New York Times contributing writer Jody Rosen, who wrote a book called White Christmas: The Story of an American Song.

The infant Irving Berlin Jr. died suddenly, less than a month after he was born. And at its heart, "White Christmas" is a deeply melancholic song.

Most Christmas carols and pop songs were unabashedly joyful. Berlin's song represented a turn, Rosen said: "It was strange to have a song that was all about this nose-pressed-up-to-the-glass feeling."

It also set a certain standard for Christmas songs that are about nostalgia, about some lost Christmas past. (Think, for example, of another enduring hit that came shortly after Berlin's smash: "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," which Judy Garland sang in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, and which was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane.)

But there's other stuff going on too. Irving Berlin was a hit machine as a Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriter. As a New Yorker and an immigrant himself, he was intimately familiar with a particular genre of songs, Rosen said: "That tradition of so-called 'home songs,' you know, songs that pine for a lost place, a lost ideal. These songs are so huge because we have an immigrant population, lots of people who've done a lot of moving. So there were songs about Irish people longing for Ireland and Italians longing for the old country there."

He said Berlin took that genre and flipped it into a Christmas song.

That's especially true of a largely forgotten, tongue-in-cheek introductory verse Berlin originally wrote for "White Christmas." The narrator is a New Yorker stuck in California (as Berlin frequently was, churning out songs for Hollywood): "The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway ... but it's December the 24th, and I am longing to be up north!" the protagonist sings.

Rosen said most people listening to "White Christmas" are missing additional subtext. He said that much of that nostalgic vibe in "White Christmas" — all that longing for a pristine, innocent Christmas of yore — is a reference to explicitly racist minstrel songs like Stephen Foster's "Old Kentucky Home," sung by Al Jolson and others — music that was still a staple in Berlin's day.

Foster was inspired by the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the song, hailed by Frederick Douglass and Paul Robeson, was meant to be empathetic to the abolitionist cause — the narrator is longing to be reunited with his wife and children, but their family has been torn apart by slaveholders. It later became a popular tune at minstrel shows, with its saddest lines omitted and its meaning twisted.

In "Old Kentucky Home," Rosen said, "You have, grotesquely, the freed Black man longing for life back below the Mason-Dixon line, back on the plantation. Here, instead of a Black man in the north longing for the sultry south, we have a well-to-do white person longing for the wintry north."

But the racial dynamics of "White Christmas" aren't just a matter of subtle references to older songs. Irving Berlin had great commercial expectations for "White Christmas." He built a whole movie around it: 1942's Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.

Holiday Inn is stuffed with racist stereotypes and an entire blackface number. (That scene is usually excised from TV broadcasts today, but the whole film is available to stream online.) As Crosby and his love interest, played by Marjorie Reynolds, prepare to perform a song about Abraham Lincoln, Crosby spreads greasepaint on her face, as the orchestra plays "White Christmas" underneath. Not only is "White Christmas" the movie's biggest hit, it's also the film's romantic theme.

Blackface on stage and on screen was very much a recent memory for 1940s audiences, said scholar Brynn Shiovitz. She's the author of the book Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood's Golden Age.

In Holiday Inn, Shiovitz said, "We get a pairing of nostalgia for Christmas, but also nostalgia for blackface, because so many of the people that were watching Holiday Inn when it premiered in the theaters grew up watching vaudeville, grew up watching their parents maybe even perform in blackface."

Audiences loved the song "White Christmas" and its spotlight in Holiday Inn — and American GIs stationed abroad during World War II clamored for the Armed Forces Radio Service to play the song. "White Christmas" was so sturdily successful that Hollywood made another movie centering the song in 1954 — also called White Christmas — this time starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen.

Since then, legions of musicians have recorded their own versions of "White Christmas" — including The Drifters, Elvis Presley, Iggy Pop and Sabrina Carpenter. And of course, each generation adds new layers of meaning to the song as it is stitched into our holiday season each year, said Shiovitz.

"With all of these other memories that people have of Christmas, whether it's being piped in while you're shopping, or it's playing on the radio in the car as you're driving to visit family — it's easy to kind of separate it from its history. People develop new memories with it. People have their own ideas of what the song represents, so it's just incredibly complex," Shiovitz said.

Today's audiences and artists don't necessarily hear or even know about the song's racist history, Shiovitz said — but that doesn't mean it's not there.
This story was edited for radio and digital by Jennifer Vanasco.
Copyright 2025 NPR

From Los Angeles to Sacramento, teachers unions, many fueled by the “We Can’t Wait” campaign organized by the California Teachers Association and a slew of contract renewals, are rallying for higher pay, better benefits, smaller class sizes and other classroom improvements. Some are threatening to strike.

In the West Contra Costa Unified School District, the call for improved pay and benefits, and classroom improvements, resulted in a six-day strike by the district’s 1,450 teachers that ended earlier this month. The teachers won an 8% pay raise over two years and will no longer have to pay healthcare premiums.

The strike is emboldening other teachers unions that are at an impasse with their districts over contract negotiations.

“We are leading a historic wave of resistance to demand safe staffing, affordable healthcare and student-centered budgets, and local chapters are organizing to strike if needed,” said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association. “Richmond showed us exactly what is possible: When we stand up for what schools educators and students deserve, we can transform public education.”

There are at least 14 school districts around the state that are at an impasse with teachers unions over contract negotiations. They are: Los Angeles Unified, San Francisco Unified, Oakland Unified, Berkeley Unified, Madera Unified, Evergreen School District, Little Lake City, Upper Lake Unified, Duarte Unified, Newport-Mesa Unified, Oak Grove Union, Apple Valley Unified, Twin Rivers Unified and Natomas Unified.

CTA campaign ratchets up the pressure

Most of these districts’ unions are part of the CTA’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign, which has spent the past few years aligning contracts to end on the same date in order to add pressure on districts in areas where multiple unions would be negotiating and could potentially strike at once.

The campaign has also shared demands for smaller class sizes and caseloads for special education educators, and more counselors, nurses and mental health professionals in schools, as well as competitive wages and benefits to retain and recruit teachers.

“It is our belief that we’ve been siloed,” said Brittoni Ward, president of Twin Rivers United Educators in Sacramento County. “Unified districts all over the state have been dragging themselves year after year through contract bargaining that gets us nowhere. We don’t make any progress, and we all essentially are fighting for the same things. So why not unify on our common goals and make change happen.”

School districts are largely pushing back on union demands, saying that with declining enrollment and rising costs, there isn’t enough money to pay teachers more. Teachers disagree, pointing to expensive outside contracts, high administrative salaries and ample reserves in some districts.

Now, teachers in several districts, including San Francisco Unified, Natomas Unified, Twin Rivers Unified, Madera Unified and Upper Lake Unified, have indicated — by vote or informal survey — that a majority are ready to strike.

Will L.A. teachers strike again?

United Teachers Los Angeles plans a strike vote in January and has already begun polling teachers to determine if there is interest. A strike in the Los Angeles Unified School District would affect 516,000 students.

There is precedent. UTLA took to the picket lines twice in recent years — in 2019, when they went on strike for six days for higher wages, and in 2023, when they walked out in support of school staff in another union.

“I will say that, like in previous years, we have gone on strike, and we’re certainly ready to go on strike,” said Julie Van Winkle, UTLA vice president. “And we feel like we need to be ready in case the district keeps ignoring our demands and making counterproposals that are inadequate. But, we’re also very open to a settlement.”

Los Angeles Unified teachers and the district are negotiating a three-year contract that would have started at the beginning of this school year. Teachers want a complete overhaul of their salary schedule, beginning with an $80,000 starting salary for new teachers, instead of the current $65,000, Van Winkle said.

They also want more arts and physical education teachers, lower class sizes in 11th and 12th grades, free child care centers in closed schools, additional resources for special education, and more psychiatric social workers, attendance counselors and pupil services staff.

Los Angeles Unified district leaders have increased their offers to UTLA multiple times in ongoing negotiations, most recently offering a 4.5% raise and 1% bonus, according to a district spokesperson. The district estimates that UTLA’s demands throughout the 2027-28 school year total more than $4 billion above the district’s current expenditures.

“We deeply value the educators and professionals who serve our students,” the spokesperson said. “We also have a responsibility to maintain long-term financial health so that every generation of Los Angeles students — today and in the future — receives the high-quality, equitable education they deserve.”

District wants to cut benefits

Teachers in the Little Lake City School District in southeastern L.A. County have yet to call a strike vote, but Maria Pilios, president of their teachers union, is preparing them for the possibility.

The 205-member union isn’t asking for a wage increase; instead, they want smaller class sizes and fully staffed special education classrooms. But the district is negotiating to reduce the amount it pays for its healthcare premiums. It currently pays 100%.

The district intends to start taking the contributions from teachers’ paychecks in January while negotiations resume, Pilios said.

Teachers and staff, many of whom grew up in the community, feel betrayed, Pilios said. She said teachers have gone without raises in the past to ensure they could retain full health benefits.

“This has changed the relationship between the staff and the district,” Pilios said.

The district’s decision means a $12,000 annual pay cut for teacher Mabel Manzur. The eighth-grade math teacher was diagnosed with cancer for the second time recently and was in the middle of treatments when she learned about the insurance change.

Manzur had to make a difficult decision: keep the doctors and treatment she had or move to a cheaper policy and start over with another doctor and possibly new treatments. She worried that her cancer history would make it difficult for her to be accepted into a new plan.

Still negotiating last year’s contract

Madera Unified teachers are tired of waiting for a contract for the 2024-25 school year, so more than 90% have indicated they are ready to strike if an agreement can’t be reached, according to David Holder, president of the Madera Unified Teachers Association.

The union wants a retroactive 8% raise on base salary, but the district is offering 4%.

According to the district, teachers have received a total compensation increase of nearly 38% over the last decade.

“A new teacher coming to Madera, on average, is making about $9,000 less in their first year than the surrounding districts, Holder said. “And so, Madera Unified is almost like a training district where we have young educators — a lot of probationary interns coming in here, finishing their credentials, getting some experience, and then they leave.”

Holder said there are still 30 to 40 open teaching positions in the district being filled by substitute teachers.

Madera Unified had 284 teachers resign from the district since the 2021-22 school year, a 93.5% retention rate, according to a statement from the district.

The union won’t bring forth proposals for this year or next until last year’s contract is completed, Holder said. The union and district started state mediation over the contract last week.

Sacramento could have two districts on strike

Two Sacramento County teachers unions are at an impasse with their districts, meaning potential strikes could affect 60,000 of the county’s students. Both districts are part of the “We Can’t Wait” campaign.

Teachers unions for both Twin Rivers Unified and Natomas Unified are seeking increased pay, a reduction in healthcare costs, smaller class sizes and more special education staff, among other things.

Twin Rivers teachers and district administrators have a long way to go before they reach an agreement. The teachers want a 12% increase in salary over two years. The district has offered 2.5% the first year and no guarantee for the next year, said Ward of Twin Rivers United Educators.

The district’s proposal would mean teachers at the top of the salary schedule would earn $152,000 annually, according to a letter from the district sent to staff in November. Beginning teachers would start at almost $77,000.

Twin Rivers Unified leaders said that the district’s salaries are among the highest in the state and that class sizes remain low.

The teachers union is also asking that the district pay more of the insurance premiums. Twin Rivers currently pays the full premium for a basic plan, but asks teachers to pay for higher-cost health plans, according to the letter.

A family of two on the Kaiser family plan pays about $1,600 a month for insurance, and others with more family members pay more, Ward said.

The district and union began their negotiations in February and are now working with a state mediator. The parties might end up having the contract negotiations move to a state fact-finding panel because of the district’s reluctance to bargain, Ward said.

Twin Rivers United Educators' executive board has already authorized a strike vote, and 80% of its membership signed a petition indicating they are ready to strike if necessary. A strike could happen as soon as March, Ward said.

The union has been at odds with the school district before, getting as far as the fact-finding stage, but it has never gone on strike.

“This time we are mobilized, and we’re ready,” Ward said. “Our membership is ready. And they see what’s going on in Richmond. They’re seeing things happening around the state, and they’re like, if that’s what it takes, we’re ready. We’re here for it.”

EdSource data journalist Daniel Willis contributed to this report.

President Trump disparaged Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who died along with his wife over the weekend in what officials are investigating as a homicide. Their 32-year-old son, Nick, has been arrested.

Reiner, 78, was a prominent supporter of the Democratic Party and a vocal Trump critic.
"A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood," Trump said in a post on Truth Social Monday morning. "Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS."

Trump went on to say that Reiner had a "raging obsession" with him, "with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before."

His post concluded with, "May Rob and Michele rest in peace!"

Tributes for Reiner have been pouring in, including from former President Barack Obama, who said that "beneath all of the stories he produced was a deep belief in the goodness of people — and a lifelong commitment to putting that belief into action."

The Los Angeles Fire Department said it responded to a medical aid request at around 3:40 p.m. local time Sunday and discovered the bodies inside the couple's home.

Reiner's son Nick had a history of addiction, which inspired the 2016 movie Being Charlie, which Nick Reiner worked on with his dad.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has had a public falling out with Trump, criticized the president's comments.

Referencing Nick Reiner's history in a post on X, Greene called the incident "a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies."

Copyright 2025 NPR