Within moments of a Wisconsin jury’s verdict acquitting Kyle Rittenhouse of all charges stemming from the killing of two police brutality protesters in Kenosha last summer, multiple protests were announced across Los Angeles and the nation.
Rittenhouse fell to his knees sobbing as the verdict was read on Friday 19th November 2021. That same verdict prompted cries of outrage among locals.
The Revolution Club issued a call to march on Los Angeles City Hall Friday at 5 p.m., according to a Revolution Club chapter leader Michelle Xai.
“This is unacceptable,” Xai said of the verdict. “What we just witnessed is a stamp of approval of white supremacist terror and murder. We have to get organized.”
Clergy, civic leaders and activists including Ionic Boom, Josh De Leon and Isabel Cardenasare scheduled to address the crowd in front of City Hall Friday.
“All those who refuse to hand the future to white supremacist fascists need to manifest,” the activist group said in a written statement. “In this trial, fascists are fighting for a judicial stamp of approval on their ‘right’ to bring high-powered weapons to protests, brandish them at progressive demonstrators, kill people they deem ‘violent rioters,’ and anybody who dares try to disarm them, and with all this, on their domination of the ‘public square.’ We say no!”
Across town, the Coalition for Community Control Over the Police was more succinct in urging people to take their outrage over the verdict to the streets of Los Angeles.
“Kyle walked,” the group said on its Facebook page. “All out. Florence/Normandie 3pm. Bring water and mutual aid items if u want to continue that work.”
As of noon, the Los Angeles Police Department was not on tactical alert, and no curfew had been announced. Both measures were standard in the summer of 2020, when tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets nightly following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis.
A protest against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, prompted Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, to take to the streets with an assault rifle in August 2020. He shot three protesters, killing Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26.
Rittenhouse was charged with intentional homicide and reckless endangerment, among other charges. He testified that he acted in self-defense. A jury deliberated for more than three days before voting to acquit him of all charges.
Since the shooting, the political right has lionized Rittenhouse as a hero of law and order, and the left has vilified him as a vigilante killer.
Civil rights activists called the shootings an attack on the movement for racial justice, and some have complained of a racial double standard in the way Rittenhouse was treated by law enforcement. The case became a lightning rod for a divided nation.
“Every person who was shot was attacking Kyle: One with a skateboard, one with his hands, one with his feet, one with a gun,” Rittenhouse’s attorney Mark Richards told jurors, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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