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LAPD Chief Beck Heckled During Westlake Community Meeting
Beck during a Feb. 2010 meeting (Photo by NewsSpy via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
LAPD Chief Charlie Beck bore the brunt of a community's anger last night during a meeting held at a Westlake-area middle school, reports the LA Times.The meeting was set up for Wednesday night to discuss the weekend's fatal shooting of a day-laborer who was allegedly threatening people with a knife.
During the meeting, Beck "was heckled and booed by many in the crowd of about 300." Beck asked for calm and respect in order to facilitate a productive discussion, however shouts from the crowd calling the LAPD "killers" and "assassins" among other outbursts, forced Beck to "step away from the microphone."
Beck has voiced support of the victim, Manuel Jamines, but believes the community's anger towards the LAPD comes from an overall sense of frustration with the authorities' "aggressive stance against the neighborhood's ubiquitous illegal street vendors," and that they are using Jamines' death as a reason for upheaval. There were four more arrests last night of protesters who resorted to violence to express their anger.
The officer who shot Jamines remains off-duty as the LAPD work to determine if he acted accordingly, and Jamines' role in the incident.
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