The city reacts to the carnage in Nice, France, how to stay safe in large crowds, coping through an endless cycle of bad news.
Reactions to the Nice attacks from Los Angeles and within the city
Officials in France say man who drove a truck through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice last night had a record of petty crime, but nothing that might indicate he would commit an act that has left at least 84 dead and hundreds injured.
For more on what happened last night in Nice, Take Two's Alex Cohen spoke to Alison Bracker, who lives there.
She grew up here in Los Angeles and lived in England for many years before relocating to the south of France in April .
Her home is a five-minute walk from where the attack took place. Yesterday, she left the Bastille Day celebration just moments before the horror began.
I first thought, of course, there may have been an accident. The sirens kept building and then I realized I got a text message from a friend who lives just few doors up from the corner where the attack happened. [She] was asking if I was alright. And I said "Yes, why?" And then she told me exactly what had happend. She had heard the gun shots before they were officially confirmed. She recognized the sound and new immediately that they were not fireworks.
Cohen also spoke with Samuel Loy who grew up in France and spent many of his summers in Nice.
He currently lives here in LA where he is the Executive Director of the French-American Chamber of Commerce. He too was on his way to celebrate the French holiday before he heard the news.
I was in the office and I was actually on my way to join the Consul General France as well as all of their elected officials for a Bastille Day celebration. The first reaction is to call our loved ones, our family, our friends to make sure everybody's okay, but you don't know if everybody's okay until we get the full list of casualties which is a very stressing and awful prospect.
To hear the full audio click the blue player above.
Terror factors in France not very different from US, expert says
As a large crowd gathered along the waterfront in Nice, France, Thursday evening to watch a Bastille Day fireworks celebration, a truck driven by Mohamed Bouhlel, 31, plowed through the crowd for more than a mile along Promenade Anglais, officials said. Bouhlel then reportedly got out of the vehicle and opened fire on fleeing spectators. At least 84 were reported dead and many more were seriously injured.
As investigators abroad try to put together the pieces of what happened in the seaside resort city, civilians and law enforcement officials here at home must face some familiar questions: Are we safe in crowds? And how do we prevent more attacks like these from happening?
For answers, Take Two spoke to Erroll Southers, the director of Homegrown Violent Extremism Studies at USC.
Highlights
I want to start with a look at the kind of attack we saw yesterday: a truck was driven through a large crowd of civilians. How would you classify this sort of attack?
It's classified as a vehicular assault. You could also call it a weapon of mass destruction. But this is not an uncommon attack; Al Quaeda called for this kind of attack years ago. It is, unfortunately, very common in the Middle East, particularly in Israel. Israel had 48 attacks in the last several years — 36 last year alone. So it is a method of attack that's effective and one that is low tech and easy to implement.
There's a phrase that we've heard a lot about the Bastille Day celebration; that's "soft target." What does "soft target" mean?
Well, a soft target means one that doesn't have the security protocols that are going to be layered that would necessarily detect or deter or defend against someone doing what he did. In other words, he was able to drive that vehicle up over the curb and get to his intended target. They didn't have barriers or Jersey barricades in place. There was no checkpoint. There was nothing that would have made it more difficult to get to in terms of access.
How are factors in France different from Factors here in the US? Or are they not that far off?
They're not that far off. There's a heavy military presence at the airport, even heavier presence at the metro stations. When I was there in February, which was before the Brussels attack, people were on edge. It was almost as if they were waiting for another shoe to drop.
They have some challenges with regards to inter-agency cooperation and sharing. I wouldn't say that they're as challenged as we may have been before 9/11, but they're not there yet...
Press the blue play button above to hear the full interview.
Everyone's a little bit racist: explaining implicit bias
There's a common thread in many of the recent killings of black people by police: officers deemed that person "threatening."
For example, some say police in Minnesota shot Philando Castile because he was seen as threatening for carrying a firearm; they argue that a white person doing the same would not have been killed.
There is an entire field of research dedicated to this psychological and social phenomenon called implicit bias.
"It's either an attitude or stereotype that you have about a social category – maybe a racial group – that you didn't know you have," says Jerry Kang, a vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. Kang says no one is immune from having implicit biases, either.
"Recognize first, with some humility, that none of us is perfect," he says.
So like the song from the musical "Avenue Q" says, everyone's a little bit racist.
Or at least some kind of -ist. Even you.
For example, someone might say men and women should do equal work in the home, but after dinner the wife defaults to doing dishes at the sink while the husband watches TV.
Or people might say they believe all races are created equal, but then get nervous about being mugged by a black person who crosses their path on the street.
Kang says researchers are able to quantify these feelings with a type of video game (which you can take it online right now).
Test-takers are asked to match faces to ideas that are quickly shown on a computer: type "1" when you see a white face or positive word, for example, and "2" if you see a black face or a negative word. Then in the next phase, type "1" when you see a white face or negative word, and "2" if you see a black face and a positive word.
The program works by tracking how fast subjects reacted.
About two-thirds of testers were able to sort words like "beauty" and "joy" faster to white faces than with black faces in one study. In another, 72 percent of people were able to more quickly sort pictures of firearms when they were shown with pictures of young black men.
"It turns out we're not nearly as color-blind and gender-blind as we think we are," says Kang. "Most people are shocked, shocked, shocked when they take one of these tests."
It is possible to change the programming in your head, however.
Kang believes that the diversity in Los Angeles is a huge benefit, actually: the greater number of relationships you have with people of different backgrounds than yourself, the greater likelihood that you'll have positive attitudes towards others who look like them.
"It turns out who your friends are do matter," says Kang.
Also, he says people's views may change when presented with "counter-typical exemplars."
If, for example, you imagine a generic police officer and the first image in your mind is of a tall, white guy, seeing a different kind of officer – say, a short Latina woman – will reset your understanding of a typical cop.
"The bottom line is you are what you eat, you are what you see," he says. "It's all something we, as a society, should work on."
The LAPD teaches its officers to check their own implicit biases
The L.A. Police Department has been training recruits about implicit bias for over a decade, and the education is meant to make sure that personal biases do not affect the way officers treat people of different races, genders, sexual orientation and more.
It came about after the discovery of widespread corruption among officers in the late 1990s, known as the LAPD Rampart scandal.
The U.S. Department of Justice issued what's known as a consent decree that mandated reforms within the LAPD.
"The consent decree put us into a 10-year, scrutinizing review of many facets of our departments," says LAPD psychologist Luann Pannell, "particularly in training in cultural diversity, different races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, persons with disabilities."
New recruits must go through several two-week-long courses that address these issues on many different levels.
Active field officers will also get a four-hour retraining in these areas every two years, as well as attend special sessions when an event prompts the department to reconsider how officers should handle similar situations in the future.
Pannell says these trainings are designed where officers will role-play and act out scenarios to get a better idea of how to act in real-life.
For example, recruits may be asked to stop a person on the street – an actor in this role-playing – who is black and matches the description of a suspect.
But that recruit must then explain to that person why they were stopped.
"How do you articulate that both respectfully and in a way that reflects, 'I'm here to do a job and serve the community, but I'm not here to indiscriminately stop somebody'?" says Pannell.
She adds that these trainings may not address all the concerns of protesters who say that officers engage in racial profiling. But Pannell believes that these sessions are one piece of how the LAPD is trying to reform its interactions with the community.
"Just having a program itself doesn't work as much as having a series looking at hiring and recruitment and background and training."
How the city of Santa Monica has helped create safer open spaces
Residents and authorities of Nice, France are still trying to process what happened and why. But eventually, they will also have to think about how to rebuild that promenade.
Security will no doubt, be top of mind. That was also the goal for the city of Santa Monica.
On July 16th of 2003, an elderly man drove through a road closure sign and into the busy Farmer's Market held at Santa Moncia's Third Street Promenade. 10 people were killed, another 63 were injured.
For more on how Santa Monica rebuilt after that tragedy, we turned to Farmer's Market Supervisor for the City of Santa Monica, Laura Avery.
Interview Highlights
What happened at the Farmer's Market on that day?
"The farmer's market was 15 minutes from closing, so, fortunately, the streets were not as crowded as they normally were during peak hours and what happened was an elderly man who had been at the post office at 5th street, turned westbound on Arizona Ave and according to all the investigation reports there was a red light at Arizona and Fourth he...instead of hitting the break, he hit the gas...right through the barricade, all the way through the market and then he stopped when he got to the end of the market, east of Ocean ave."
When and how did the city of Santa Monica start to think about how to respond on an infrastructure level to what had happened?
"Well, we'd always had a traffic control plan in place. We had 'road closed' ahead signs and we had the typical folding barricades in the street. After this happened, when we realized someone could drive through, immediately what happened was police vehicles were placed at all the entrances of the streets...while the city then looked at putting up some sort of permanent – it's called a vehicle arresting barricade– to put in place. But they wanted to find a non-lethal vehicle arresting barricade..not a fixed post, that if someone crashed into it, they would also be killed...
After a couple years of research, they found a company that builds a device called a dragnet and what that is, it's sort of like a stainless steel tennis court net that is attached to a steel cable that is anchored into the ground – four-foot deep ballards that are sunk into the ground. Similar to what they use on aircraft carriers to catch the tail of a plane that's landing. To stop a rapidly moving vehicle in a very short amount of space."
If you were to advise other places around the world, what advice would you give them between striking that balance between safety and openness?
"We have been asked by several cities and other organizations to provide them with a copy of our traffic control plan. I think a lot of people look at our traffic control plan as being as state of the art as there is, if there is one today. So, I mean I think it's just a matter of stopping a vehicle without hurting either the person who's driving or having the actual barrier you put up hurt somebody else. So, I believe that we are sort of a model that other communities and farmer's markets can look at and we have a very high expectation that we're going to be safe inside the market. We're talking about an average driver, this is not a barricade that's going to stop a semi-truck that's going 75 mph."
To hear the full segment, click the blue play button above.
Answers have been edited for clarity.
Meet the millennial contest-winners reporting from the RNC and DNC
The national party conventions are upon us!
On Monday, the Republican Party Convention kicks off in Cleveland and the following week, the Democratic Party has its turn in Philadelphia.
The presumptive nominees, delegates, party leaders, and reporters will all be there.
And along with them will be winners of a competition called "Crash the Parties," put on by Fuse and Voto Latino, an organization focused on getting Latinos engaged in the political process.
, a rising senior at UMass Amherst and reporter for the Amherst Wire, will be headed to the RNC, and LA-based actress and TV host Arlene Santana will report from the Democratic Party Convention.
While at the conventions, they'll report for Fuse on issues that matter to a young, multicultural audience.
James Villalobos, Arlene Santana and Michael Schwimmer, president and CEO of Fuse Media, joined Take Two to talk about "Crash the Parties."
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player above.
'Equals' director Drake Doremus talks love and Kristen Stewart
Imagine a world where you weren't allowed to feel anything. No happiness. No sadness. No anger. No love.
That's exactly what life is like in the new futuristic film "Equals." It stars actor Nicholas Hoult as a young man named Silas, who suffers from a disease known as Switched on syndrome, or SOS.
"Equals" was directed by our next guest Drake Doremus. He dropped by KPCC to tell Alex Cohen about his latest film, and why love seems to be the common thread that connects his work.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue audio player above.
New art event aims to help Angelenos think about water differently
With all the troubling news of the world, it's almost too much to think about some of the pressing challenges we face here at home in California... like the drought.
Nonetheless, our long dry spell does continue. Starting this weekend, the city of Los Angeles will launch a new way to think about water. Saturday, July, 16, marks the beginning of LA's first public art biennial known as Current.
Director of public art for the L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs, Felicia Filer who helped organize the event, joined the show to discuss.
To hear the full segment, click the blue play button above.
Reimagined Ecto-1 squeals into Ghostbusters reboot
It’s been 32 years since the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 peeled out of a dilapidated New York City fire station, blue sirens flashing and screaming through the foggy night.
And this weekend, it’s back — updated and hitting the paranormal-infested streets of the big apple yet again in the Ghostbusters reboot— this time with a gaggle of ghost-battling ladies behind the wheel.
Here at Take Two, we ain’t afraid of no ghost. And we ain’t afraid of no slime-splattered hearse either. We're taking a look at the reimagined Ecto-1 and its new two-wheeled companion, the Ecto-2.
"You can not do Ghostbusters without the Ecto-1," Ghostbusters director and co-writer Paul Feig told the web site, MotorAuthority.com. Just like the proton packs, ghost packs and slime, the Ecto-1 was "imperative," he said.
But even though it shares the same name as the 1984 original, the 2016 Ecto-1 is different. It's based on a 1984 Cadillac hearse, rather than a 1959 Cadillac ambulance. Instead of the usual Detroit-issue hood ornament, there's a silver ghost. And there's a ladder to get to all the junk on the roof, including some sort of canister with a caution sticker that reads, “Warning: Parts may fall off.”
Every ghostbusting gadget in the new film has a back story, including the new Ecto-1, which is borrowed from the uncle of the Leslie Jones character, Patty. The uncle 's trademark: He paints all of his hearse roofs red because the dead "should go out in style."
It's Kate McKinnon's character Jillian who "fixes" the hearse by repainting the hearse body white and precariously loading its sagging chassis with quasi high-tech gear.
New to the Ghostbusters film franchise is the Ecto-2 motorcycle, which looks every bit as rickety as its companion car. A vintage dual sport with knobby tires that may or may not gain traction in the slime, the rear fender is loaded with a bin full of junk and its handlebars do double duty for what appear to be rocket launchers.