Patricia Nazario of KPCC brought herself and nearly everyone in our enormous hotel conference room to tears with her detail-by-detail description of a confrontation with an LAPD Metro officer more than a month ago at MacArthur Park, during a panel at NAHJ:
Choking back tears, radio reporter Patricia Nazario described officers jabbing her with a baton, then knocking her over. "I have traveled by myself. I have been to Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica. I have filed stories from those places and I have never had confrontations like this with the police. Nothing ever so frightening," said Nazario.
It was very intense to watch Nazario, still shaken, describe how she turned to try to identify the officer striking her and realized she could not see his face and that he wore no identification, making him as anonymous as the rest of the cops standing down on the crowd. "This guy could kill me and he could get away with it," she recalled thinking. Bratton sat three chairs away, stone-faced.
The attendees at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists' annual convention in San Jose were clearly still eager to hear about what happened at MacArthur Park on May 1, although here in L.A. we've generally moved on to more important matters like Paris Hilton's jail-time and who the mayor might be sleeping with -- although, indeed, at least one of those topics was also in heavy rotation in the cocktail chatter. On Friday, Bratton got points with people I talked to for showing up and tackling the questions head-on.
Other news from the student reporters at NAHJ: Schwarzenegger telling an audience of Spanish-language news reporters that people shouldn't watch Spanish-language news, an audio piece on the outsourcing of ethnic media in San Francisco, and another audio piece on the beefs between immigrant sureño and pocho norteño gangs in city of cholos San Jose, with interviews with gang members.
* On NAHJ: The convention looked thinner than other years, some noted. Think the $290 on-site single-day registration fee might have something to do with that? People come to NAHJ to meet recruiters and network for employment, which theoretically means they don't have 300 dollars lying around to pay to do this, nevermind hotel costs and travel. Or the fact that the convention is sponsored by huge, huge corporate firms.
* Photo by AP.
** THURSDAY update: The Daily News' Rachel Uranga wrote the story I quoted above and also blogged the Bratton panel at NAHJ and Nazario's emotional comments. Bratton told the audience the LAPD was working on putting identification on officers' helmets.