Listen up: One woman’s commitment to Say Their Names
Say Their Names L.A., a die-in organized in October by a South Bay resident, involved 626 makeshift headstones representing people who had died in an officer-involved incident since 2012. Photo by Ashley Balderrama At dusk on a Saturday in October, more than 300 people prostrated themselves on a downtown Los Angeles street. Each held a wooden board or two, painted black and bearing the name, age, and photograph of an Angeleno who was killed by an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department or the L.A. Sheriff’s Department since the day in December of 2012 that Jackie Lacey became the city’s district attorney. (Lacey was defeated in the Nov. 3 election.) The date was important because during Lacey’s eight-year tenure, only one officer who had ended a life was prosecuted, though 626 people had died. This was the detail that moved Laura Peterson, who is 34 and currently residing in Hollywood Riviera, to organize the “die-in,” a form of protest popularized at the beginning of the Iraq War. As she and the others lay in the street with wet cheeks, a song by Palos Verdes-born artist MILCK echoed: “They were somebody’s first call, somebody’s home, someone who lived with tears and…
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