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  • Cornel West selects L.A. professor and activist Melina Abdullah as presidential running mate

    Cornel West selects L.A. professor and activist Melina Abdullah as presidential running mate

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    Independent presidential candidate Cornel West named Cal State Los Angeles professor Melina Abdullah as his running mate on Wednesday, saying that her commitment to social justice and to prioritizing the needs of poor Americans embodied the values of his candidacy.

    “I wanted to to run with someone who would put a smile on the face of [civil rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. from the grave,” West said on Tavis Smiley’s Los Angeles radio program.

    Abdullah is well-known figure in local political circles: She co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter and has been a fixture in recent years at protests and acts of civil disobedience on issues including police funding and the war in the Gaza Strip.

    West’s choice means at least three women from California are running for vice president — Abdullah, Vice President Kamala Harris and Nicole Shanahan, selected by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Former President Trump has not announced his choice for running mate.) The three candidates reflect the wide spectrum of backgrounds the state has to offer, with Harris coming up in the rough-and-tumble of Bay Area politics, Shanahan steeped in the Silicon Valley and Abdullah representing leftist and progressive grassroots activism.

    “It’s striking. But that’s about all that we have in common,” Abdullah said when Smiley noted that she and Harris had Bay Area roots and both attended Howard University.

    During the broadcast, Abdullah recalled first meeting West when she was as an undergraduate student at Howard, and said she revered his influence on American political thought.

    “It felt as though God was speaking to me, and I said ‘yes,‘” she said of receiving his call last week.

    She noted that theirs was the first presidential ticket in the U.S. to include a Muslim, and Smiley pointed out that it was the first all-Black ticket.

    “Both of us want to disrupt the narrative that you have only two choices,” said Abdullah, 52, referring to Trump and President Biden, the presumptive major-party nominees. “The world tries to tell us that we’re tethered to certain ideas that we don’t have to be tethered to. We can be expansive, and imaginative.”

    West, an academic, author and activist, said alternative voices are needed to represent the anger of Americans frustrated by wars abroad and a lack of investment in communities at home. Lacking the infrastructure of a mainstream political party, West is collecting signatures to appear on ballots across the country. According to his website, he is now on the ballot only in Alaska, Oregon, South Carolina and Utah.

    Selecting a vice presidential candidate is a key part of the process of making the ballot in many states.

    “Trump is leading the country toward a second Civil War. Biden is leading the world toward World War III,” West told Smiley, with whom he co-hosted a radio program a decade ago. “That’s the choice you have if you only are tied to the duopoly. That’s what it comes down to. We are providing an alternative. … We ain’t on nobody’s plantation.”

    Cal State L.A. campus police remove Melina Abdullah, who is known for her activism, from a protest during a 2022 Los Angeles mayoral debate.

    (Ringo Chiu / For The Times)

    In recent years, Abdullah has spoken out against police shootings and increases in the Los Angeles Police Department budget. She has regularly appeared at Police Commission meetings, and as The Times wrote in 2015, has turned “normally dry public hearings into hours-long confrontations that frequently devolve into officers clearing demonstrators from the room.”

    She has long pushed for abolishing the police and prisons, and in 2020 was a forceful opponent of then-Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey’s reelection campaign, and a supporter of current Dist. Atty. George Gascón.

    During that race, Lacey’s husband, David, was charged with assault after he was accused of waving a gun at Abdullah and other protesters when they appeared outside the couple’s Granada Hills home early one morning. (The case was dismissed after he finished a diversion program.)

    In 2022, Abdullah was forcibly removed from a mayoral debate on Cal State L.A.’s campus. She and Karen Bass, who has been mayor of Los Angeles since that election, have a decades-long relationship.

    In 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Abdullah was a central figure in organizing large rallies in Los Angeles. More than a decade ago, along with Patrisse Cullors and others, she built what would grow to become the Black Lives Matter movement and later the nonprofit Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

    Abdullah also is the founder of Black Lives Matter Grassroots Inc., which made waves in 2022 by accusing the foundation and one of its executives, Shalomyah Bowers, of “fraudulently [raising] money from unsuspecting donors” and diverting it to benefit Bowers and his consulting firm.

    Bowers and the foundation vigorously denied the allegations and sought the dismissal of a lawsuit that asked for $10 million in damages. L.A. Superior Court Judge Stephanie Bowick agreed to toss out the lawsuit in June 2023.

    In her ruling, Bowick wrote that part of the lawsuit’s “allegations are so confusing and unintelligible it cannot even be determined what” was being alleged.

    The judge earlier this year ordered Abdullah’s group to pay more than $374,000 in legal fees and costs to the foundation, Bowers and his consulting group.

    Smiley asked about these legal fights, and Abdullah said that as nonprofits, the various chapters that belong to Black Lives Matter Grassroots wouldn’t be endorsing anyone in the 2024 race.

    “Some people might see it as baggage, but I actually see the work and experience of organizing and the kind of authenticity of our work as being something that actually fuels this campaign,” she said. “I know that as we move forward, organizing is essential.”

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    Benjamin Oreskes, Matt Hamilton

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  • Lawyer in Black Lives Matter ‘swatting’ case demands answers after LAPD searches his home

    Lawyer in Black Lives Matter ‘swatting’ case demands answers after LAPD searches his home

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    An attorney for Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles leader Melina Abdullah is demanding that the Los Angeles Police Department return or destroy any privileged attorney-client records officers may have photographed while searching his Hollywood home this week. He is also demanding answers about the reason for the search, which he says was unjustified.

    A police spokeswoman said the search is now the subject of an internal affairs investigation.

    Dermot Givens, 67, represents Abdullah in a lawsuit in which she accuses the LAPD of badly mishandling a 2020 “swatting” incident, when heavily armed officers in tactical gear surrounded her home based on a false report of an emergency there.

    Givens said his first thought when he saw similarly armed LAPD officers swarming his townhome Tuesday was that he was being “swatted” himself.

    “I go, ‘Are you all swatting me?’” Givens said in an interview Friday with The Times. “And they said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘I live here!’”

    A squad car outside Givens’ home.

    (Dermot Givens)

    Givens said armed LAPD officers showed him a warrant that listed his address but not his name, then “ransacked” his home. He said officers left without finding whom and what they told him they were looking for: a much younger Black man and an Apple AirTag they said was pinging in the vicinity of the home, among other items.

    What the officers did take, Givens said, were photographs of documents from Abdullah’s case that happened to be on his kitchen table. He was initially escorted outside but walked in on officers photographing the documents, he said.

    “I had everything out,” he said of the documents.

    By Friday, the matter was before a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court, where Erin Darling — another attorney for Abdullah — filed for an emergency order requiring the LAPD to return or destroy any “attorney work product” they’d taken or captured in the pictures, as well as provide a copy of records supporting the search warrant.

    “The LAPD has trampled on [Givens’] attorney work product,” the filing states.

    Darling said a judge granted the order, but he had not received any of the materials as of Friday evening. Online court records show that the order was granted.

    Capt. Kelly Muniz, a spokeswoman for the LAPD, said in a statement to The Times late Friday that the department could not comment on the incident “since it is an open criminal case as well as an open internal affairs investigation.”

    Abdullah said she learned of the matter Friday and found it concerning.

    “The first thing [I thought] was, like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy that they swatted the attorney who is suing them on my behalf for swatting me,’” she said. “Along with, ‘Is Dermot OK?’”

    Givens said he was fine but shaken, embarrassed and angry — and full of questions.

    He said it made no sense that a judge would grant a warrant for police to search his home, even if they did believe that an AirTag — a trackable electronic device that can be attached to luggage or other property — was inside.

    “If you’re doing an investigation to find somebody’s stolen property, wouldn’t you go and find out who lives in the house and talk to the person who lives in the house?” he said.

    If they were looking for a younger Black man, whom he said they referred to as “Tyler,” why wouldn’t they accept what he told them when they arrived: that he had lived at the home for more than 20 years, alone, and didn’t know “Tyler”?

    Givens said the officers refused to give him a full copy of the warrant, providing only the last two pages of the four-page document. Those pages — which were included in Darling’s court filing — said the warrant was to search for firearms and ammunition, any “identity theft and forgery-related materials,” cameras, lock-picking equipment and cellphones and other communication devices.

    Givens called the incident “absolutely crazy” — and terrifying.

    If he hadn’t seen the officers rolling onto his block in multiple vehicles and walked onto his balcony, would they have busted in on him? They had a battering ram, so breaking into his home if necessary seemed part of their plan, he said. That’s how Black men like him get killed, he said — for making a “furtive movement.”

    Givens said the officers “ransacked” his home, leaving it in disarray, with items taken out of closets and left on the floor. He worries what his neighbors think.

    “It’s totally f— embarrassing,” he said.

    A bedroom following an LAPD search.

    Givens said LAPD officers “ransacked” his home.

    (Dermot Givens)

    Givens said he has represented many clients suing the police and wonders if the search was a matter of “retaliation and intimidation.”

    “I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” he said. “But this is something that was planned.”

    He said he is eager to see what Darling’s filing produces — including what was the justification for the warrant.

    “Our justice system is supposed to get us to the truth,” he said.

    Darling said he was equally interested in that information.

    “What did they actually give to the judge for that judge to grant a warrant for a property that is actually the home of Mr. Givens?” Darling said. “In theory, it’s a high standard. They have to have probable cause that a crime has been committed, or that something related to a crime is going to be in someone’s home.”

    Abdullah has been swatted — in which someone calls in a false emergency to draw armed police to a location — at least three times.

    The first incident occurred in August 2020, after a summer of protests against police brutality that Abdullah helped organize as a leader of Black Lives Matter. According to 911 calls reviewed by The Times, the caller claimed to be holding people hostage at Abdullah’s home to “send a message” that “BLM is a bunch of retards.”

    In September 2021, Abdullah filed suit against the LAPD, alleging that its actions during the incident — when she was drawn out of her home at gunpoint — constituted unlawful seizure, false imprisonment, excessive force and assault and negligence, among other violations of her rights.

    The day after the lawsuit was announced, Abdullah was swatted a second time. Within days, she was swatted a third time.

    Swatting is considered highly dangerous for the targets; such incidents have been deadly.

    Authorities have been investigating the incidents against Abdullah and said they believe the person responsible had made false calls to other U.S. police departments.

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    Kevin Rector

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