After the Super Bowl, Anthony Weber left a friend’s apartment in Los Angeles to go to dinner with his girlfriend. Around the same time, a 911 call to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said a black man with a gun was threatening a motorist. Soon, Anthony — a mixed race 16-year-old, was dead in a darkened courtyard of a run-down apartment complex, with no gun anywhere around, the New York Times reports. Nearly two months later, questions about the case are unanswered. Long before police shootings and protests in Ferguson, Mo., or Sacramento focused attention on how police treat black men, Los Angeles was a byword for police brutality and racism. The police force has been reshaped to reflect the city’s diversity better. To Weber’s family, Black Lives Matter activists, and many in South Los Angeles, an area still rife with crime and poverty, his death and its aftermath are signs of how much more needs to change and how the police can be too quick to use deadly force against black men.
“We are light-years from where we were, and light-years from where we need to be,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights lawyer who began suing the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1990s, and has worked with the department on new approaches to policing. Crime has fallen drastically. There were more than 1,000 murders in a single year in the city of Los Angeles in the 1990s, but the total now is under 300 a year. Even so, gangs are still ubiquitous, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has said that Anthony was involved with them, an allegation that has outraged activists. In the Weber case, deputies believed Anthony had a gun. They say he refused to obey an order to halt and ran away.