Sheriff Villanueva - Part 1
Imperfect Paradise
LAist Studios
4.5 • 535 Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2022
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We begin with a scene of a very strange press conference: Sheriff Alex Villanueva is threatening to open a criminal investigation into an LA Times reporter, and our host, Frank Stoltze, is questioning him about it. Through Frank’s reflections on his time covering policing in LA County, we learn that Villanueva is the product of a department that has been riddled with scandals for decades: racial profiling, jail violence and deputy gangs. We learn how Villanueva sees himself as the man to fix it.
Transcript
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| 0:33.3 | of news conferences in my career as a journalist, and never have I seen anything like the one |
| 0:38.3 | I attended in April of 2022. |
| 0:41.2 | Good morning, everyone. |
| 0:42.6 | Thank you for joining us today. |
| 0:44.0 | My name is Lorena Rodriguez. |
| 0:45.3 | I'm in the first floor press room. |
| 0:47.0 | It's in the basement of L.A.'s Historic Hall of Justice. |
| 0:50.5 | About a half a dozen reporters are there, along with some TV cameras, and a bunch of armed sheriff's deputies in tanning green uniforms. |
| 0:59.4 | Now it is my honor to present the sheriff of Los Angeles County, Alex Villanova. |
| 1:06.8 | Morning, everyone. We'll walk with you from the starting point, which is March 10th of last year, the date of the incident in San Fernando Court, which you probably already familiar with. You've seen the video. |
| 1:16.6 | The video is from a courthouse security camera. It shows a pair of deputies escorting a man down the hallway. The man punches one of the deputies and two more run over to help. They wrestle him to the ground |
| 1:29.2 | and handcuff him. One of the deputies puts his knee on the head of the man for more than three |
| 1:35.1 | minutes. It's eerily similar to the George Floyd video. All of this happened a year before this, |
| 1:42.6 | but the video had just been published by the LA Times. |
| 1:46.3 | And some of Vienoava's own people, his own command staff, were accusing him of trying to cover up the video. |
| 1:53.0 | The sheriff denies this. He thinks the real problem is how the video got out in the first place. |
... |
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