World Can't Wait Condemns Theft & Trashing of ANSWER LA Office

29 July 2012

Sometime late Monday night July 23 or in the early hours of Tuesday July 24, 2012 ANSWER Coalition’s Los Angeles office was broken into and thoroughly ransacked. All ten of their computers, large sized sound systems and all of their bullhorns were stolen. Files were ransacked, and their office was generally trashed. A quantity of cash that was out in the open, however, was left unmolested.

ANSWER’s office is on the second floor of an office building in LA’s Koreatown. Despite the fact that other offices in the same building had much higher value equipment, no other office had their equipment stolen. So much was taken from ANSWER’s office, in fact, that a truck must have been needed to haul it all away.

This cowardly, reactionary, and serious attack followed immediately on the heels of ANSWER’s visible participation in the ongoing Anaheim protests against the police murders of Manuel Angel Diaz, 25, killed on Saturday and Joel Acevedo, 21, killed the very next evening. Diaz was shot while washing his hands and talking with friends, first in the back and then, when he fell to the ground, in the head. Acevedo was shot multiple times, including twice in the head, while at Walmart. These executions of Latinos have sparked several days of righteous mass demonstrations in Anaheim.

Given the circumstances, this break-in and burglary appear to be in retaliation for the protests against police murders. ANSWER’s signs were clearly visible in many of the media’s pictures of the protests and ANSWER spokespeople were interviewed by reporters at these actions. On Monday, immediately preceding the ransacking of their office, ANSWER received a deluge of racist and hateful phone threats, accompanied by and also unquestionably inspired by attacks upon them by right-wing pundits such as Glenn Beck, who specifically singled out ANSWER on his website Monday afternoon.

This attack on ANSWER is an indication of the essence of reactionaries who, in order to remain in control, regard any killings of people of oppressed nationalities as justifiable homicide, issue vile threats anonymously over the phone against those who seek to expose these deeds, and in the dead of the night, break into and destroy or steal materials needed by activists to do their organizing work.

World Can’t Wait roundly condemns this attack as further evidence of the need to unite in defending rights of the people to protest actions of their government.

E-mail: worldcantwait_la@yahoo.com