‘Nobody wants to call LAPD anymore': Outrage follows killing of man with replica gun
Police officials said Jeremy Flores, 26, was shot last month as he sat in a van holding what turned out to be an Airsoft rifle, which shoots plastic pellets.
More than half a dozen people who spoke at the meeting called for the immediate release of unedited body camera footage from the July 14 incident. Under state law, police have to release video within 45 days of a shooting by officers.
'I just want justice for my son,' Flores' mother, Isabella Rivera, told the commission by phone. 'Nobody wants to call LAPD anymore because we are scared of them: There is too much violence.'
She joined other speakers in questioning why Los Angeles Police Department officers didn't do more to try to defuse the situation, while also demanding to know why police waited about two hours to provide medical assistance to Flores as he lay bleeding to death.
The killing sparked several protests in recent weeks in the working-class Latino neighborhood on the city's Eastside, including one at Mariachi Plaza.
At a rally for Flores on Aug. 5, demonstrators who showed up at a National Night Out gathering organized by the LAPD were forced back by a line of officers wielding batons. At one point, Flores' sister was reportedly knocked to the ground by an officer. Several people who spoke at Tuesday's meeting of the Police Commission — the civilian watchdog that oversees the LAPD — denounced the use of force.
The department has identified officers who shot Flores as Livier Jimenez, Fernando Godinez and Michael Ruiz.
Police have said that the Hollenbeck Division officers were responding to a 911 call about a man with a 'possible assault rifle' when they encountered Flores in an alley on the 1200 block of Spence Street, sitting inside a white utility van holding what looked like a rifle.
They said he refused commands to exit the van and drop the weapon, which officers did not realize was not a real gun. Instead, according to police, Flores continued to sit in the driver's seat and then raised the replica rifle, prompting three officers to open fire.
Police said that after the shooting, Flores 'remained non-compliant and refused to exit the vehicle.' Eventually, a cadre of heavily armed SWAT officers and paramedics approached the vehicle and found him unresponsive. He was pronounced dead due to multiple gunshot wounds.
As with all LAPD shootings, an internal review is underway. The case is also being investigated by the state attorney general's office, which looks at all police shootings of unarmed individuals. Replica guns are not considered deadly under state law, and a person carrying them is considered unarmed.
Rivera described Flores as 'smart' and a bighearted son who liked to write music and was making an effort to start going back to church regularly. Although he was good with numbers, he wanted to try for a job in construction because of the pay and benefits, she said.
'We don't prepare for these kinds of tragedies,' she said. 'My boy's life counts, he was a human like everybody else. I'm not looking for money. I'm just looking for justice.'
Flores, she said, had experienced occasional stumbles as a young adult. Not long before his death, he had been released from jail after being locked up on a probation violation, she said.
And yet, she had noticed a change in him. A while back, he had written out a list of goals in a diary: cleaning up his act, going back to school and planned to get married.
His fiancee, Paola Mendez, said the couple had known each other only a short time but talked often about their future. She has taken to posting some of their text exchanges on her Instagram account.
'I want them to take accountability. I want them to pay for what they did,' she said.
Even though police have not released any other details, Mendez said she believes Flores may have experienced a mental health crisis.
So far in 2025, LAPD officers have opened fire 27 times — killing nine people and wounding an additional 14 — compared with 19 police shootings at the same time last year, police records show. According to a Times database, Flores was at least the 18th person shot by police in Boyle Heights since 2015 — the second-highest number in any area after downtown.
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Los Angeles Times
9 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Nobody wants to call LAPD anymore': Outrage follows killing of man with replica gun
Activists and family members of a man shot and killed by LAPD officers in Boyle Heights flooded a Police Commission meeting Tuesday to denounce the department's handling of the incident. Police officials said Jeremy Flores, 26, was shot last month as he sat in a van holding what turned out to be an Airsoft rifle, which shoots plastic pellets. More than half a dozen people who spoke at the meeting called for the immediate release of unedited body camera footage from the July 14 incident. Under state law, police have to release video within 45 days of a shooting by officers. 'I just want justice for my son,' Flores' mother, Isabella Rivera, told the commission by phone. 'Nobody wants to call LAPD anymore because we are scared of them: There is too much violence.' She joined other speakers in questioning why Los Angeles Police Department officers didn't do more to try to defuse the situation, while also demanding to know why police waited about two hours to provide medical assistance to Flores as he lay bleeding to death. The killing sparked several protests in recent weeks in the working-class Latino neighborhood on the city's Eastside, including one at Mariachi Plaza. At a rally for Flores on Aug. 5, demonstrators who showed up at a National Night Out gathering organized by the LAPD were forced back by a line of officers wielding batons. At one point, Flores' sister was reportedly knocked to the ground by an officer. Several people who spoke at Tuesday's meeting of the Police Commission — the civilian watchdog that oversees the LAPD — denounced the use of force. The department has identified officers who shot Flores as Livier Jimenez, Fernando Godinez and Michael Ruiz. Police have said that the Hollenbeck Division officers were responding to a 911 call about a man with a 'possible assault rifle' when they encountered Flores in an alley on the 1200 block of Spence Street, sitting inside a white utility van holding what looked like a rifle. They said he refused commands to exit the van and drop the weapon, which officers did not realize was not a real gun. Instead, according to police, Flores continued to sit in the driver's seat and then raised the replica rifle, prompting three officers to open fire. Police said that after the shooting, Flores 'remained non-compliant and refused to exit the vehicle.' Eventually, a cadre of heavily armed SWAT officers and paramedics approached the vehicle and found him unresponsive. He was pronounced dead due to multiple gunshot wounds. As with all LAPD shootings, an internal review is underway. The case is also being investigated by the state attorney general's office, which looks at all police shootings of unarmed individuals. Replica guns are not considered deadly under state law, and a person carrying them is considered unarmed. Rivera described Flores as 'smart' and a bighearted son who liked to write music and was making an effort to start going back to church regularly. Although he was good with numbers, he wanted to try for a job in construction because of the pay and benefits, she said. 'We don't prepare for these kinds of tragedies,' she said. 'My boy's life counts, he was a human like everybody else. I'm not looking for money. I'm just looking for justice.' Flores, she said, had experienced occasional stumbles as a young adult. Not long before his death, he had been released from jail after being locked up on a probation violation, she said. And yet, she had noticed a change in him. A while back, he had written out a list of goals in a diary: cleaning up his act, going back to school and planned to get married. His fiancee, Paola Mendez, said the couple had known each other only a short time but talked often about their future. She has taken to posting some of their text exchanges on her Instagram account. 'I want them to take accountability. I want them to pay for what they did,' she said. Even though police have not released any other details, Mendez said she believes Flores may have experienced a mental health crisis. So far in 2025, LAPD officers have opened fire 27 times — killing nine people and wounding an additional 14 — compared with 19 police shootings at the same time last year, police records show. According to a Times database, Flores was at least the 18th person shot by police in Boyle Heights since 2015 — the second-highest number in any area after downtown.
NBC News
a day ago
- NBC News
What's behind the TikTok accounts using AI-generated versions of real Latino journalists?
A network of nearly 90 TikTok accounts has been using artificial intelligence to create fake versions of high-profile Spanish-language journalists and spread falsehoods online for potential financial gain. Over a third of the accounts used AI-generated versions of Jorge Ramos, one of the best-known Latino journalists in the United States, to front fabricated news stories. One of them featured an AI avatar of Ramos falsely claiming that President Donald Trump's son Barron Trump stormed into the United Nations to denounce the deportation of his mother, first lady Melania Trump. "I never said that," Ramos himself said in Spanish last month when he debunked the false narrative in a TikTok video posted on the account of this new independent news program. Ramos launched the show, 'Así Veo las Cosas,' on social media this year following his exit from Univision in December after nearly 40 years at the network. "There are things that are impossible to stop, and we can't stop artificial intelligence right now," Ramos said in his video. "There are tons of videos of me where I'm supposedly saying things I have never said." The accounts point to the challenge of stopping or controlling the surge in fake images and misinformation as AI technology advances and is increasingly used by those who want to spread false information online. Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, Cornell University's graduate campus in New York City, found 88 TikTok accounts that routinely used AI-generated versions of Ramos and other Latino news anchors from the Spanish-language networks Telemundo and Televisa to spread misinformation online targeting Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States. NBC News reviewed the contents of the 88 accounts before TikTok shut them down after it learned of Mantzarlis' findings. Most of the 88 accounts were created this year and used AI avatars of Ramos, Noticias Telemundo and NBC News anchor José Díaz-Balart and Televisa anchor Enrique Acevedo. (Telemundo and NBC News are owned by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corp.) Their AI avatars, some of which were more realistic than others, were used to front false stories about divisive topics such as immigration, as well as conspiracy theories about Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Sean "Diddy" Combs. The most recent videos posted by the now-deleted accounts had the AI avatars talk about a fabricated story of an orca attack that went viral and a nonexistent curfew for children based on a false law authorizing the abduction of children in the United States. The comments on a video about the false storyline fronted by Acevedo's AI avatar showed that while some users seem to have identified the content as false, other expressed distress over it, suggesting they believed the misinformation being spread. "These deepfakes hijack my voice, my image, and — more importantly — the trust I've built with audiences over the years. I'm leaning on transparency, calling them out publicly, but the scale of this threat is bigger than any one journalist," Acevedo told Mantzarlis, who wrote about his findings on his . A TikTok spokesperson told NBC News in a statement that the company 'banned these accounts for violating our Community Guidelines and continue[s] to vigilantly protect our platform from harmful misinformation and deceptive AI-generated content." Mantzarlis said there are probably hundreds more such accounts on the platform. He first began researching the trend more than six months ago. In March, Mantzarlis discovered a network of nearly 40 TikTok accounts posing as Telemundo and Univision that used AI-generated content and the voices of well-known professional journalists to spread misinformation about topics that tend to go viral on social media. The accounts went undetected for about a month before TikTok shut them down. But the trends Mantzarlis found on TikTok have evolved as more social media platforms integrate AI tools into their apps, making it easier to generate credible AI avatars, he told NBC News. Based on his research, Mantzarlis said the creators behind such TikTok accounts are constantly trying different ways to generate content that creates large viewership numbers to accumulate at least 10,000 followers — which is the minimum required to monetize videos under TikTok's Creator Rewards Program. The creators have 'determined that sensationalist news in Spanish, targeting a U.S. audience, does numbers, so they'll try to feed that niche,' he said. That's why some of them have even used AI-generated versions of non-native Spanish speakers — including a Brazilian journalist and comedians from 'The Daily Show,' an American satirical TV program — to spread Spanish-language misinformation. Mantzarlis said he found "very strong evidence" suggesting that such TikTok accounts are being built up to garner enough followers to monetize their videos. The monetized TikTok accounts are then sold to other people "who can change the topic and theme and find another niche' they can profit from. Mantzarlis found an encrypted chat group managed by Brazilian TikTok creators who claimed to sell monetized social media accounts that came pre-loaded with AI-generated clickbait content. In it, he saw someone claim to be selling a monetized TikTok account named "Tv Telemundo" for 300 Brazilian reals, or about $55. The account had posted AI-generated news and religious content to gain 11,000 followers under the previous name. The account now shares AI-generated wellness content. Marta Planells, Telemundo's vice president of digital news and streaming, told NBC News that the network has been reporting TikTok accounts impersonating Telemundo and their anchors for over a year. Once the accounts are reported, Planells said, TikTok has been proactive in shutting them down. But when that happens, more accounts come up, she added. Even after Mantzarlis published his research last week based on the initial sample of 88 TikTok accounts, he found six other accounts publishing misinformation fronted by AI avatars of real Latino journalists. TikTok also shut down those accounts. TikTok did not tell NBC News whether any of the accounts Mantzarlis identified were part of the Creator Rewards Program. TikTok claimed in a company report published this year to have proactively removed more than 94% of the content that it identified as violating its policies about AI-generated content and misinformation. Despite the efforts to remove false content, Ramos still encouraged his followers on TikTok to remain "vigilant, because misinformation is everywhere." "There are tons and tons of fake videos that appear to be real," he said. "This, of course, creates a lot of confusion."
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
Metro bus ridership continues to dip. Are fears over ICE raids partly to blame?
Ridership across Metro's transit system plunged in June after federal immigration authorities conducted dramatic raids across Los Angeles County, sowing fear among many rail and bus riders. Last month, the transit agency's passenger numbers on buses continued to dip, although the reasons are not fully clear. Ridership on rail crept up roughly 6.5% in July after a decrease of more than 3.7 million boardings across the rail and bus system the month before. Bus ridership accounted for the bulk of the June hit, with a ridership drop of more than 3.1 million from May. In July, bus boardings continued to decrease slightly by nearly 2%. While it's possible that concerns over safety have persisted as immigration raids continued to play out in the Los Angeles region, a drop in bus ridership from June to July in years past has not been uncommon, according to Metro data. A review of the number of boardings from 2018 shows routine dips in bus ridership during the summer months. The agency said 'there is a seasonal pattern to ridership and historically bus ridership is lower in July than June when schools and colleges are not in regular session and people are more likely to take time off from work.' June saw a roughly 13.5% decline from the month before — the lowest June on record since 2022, when boardings had begun to climb again after the pandemic. The reduction in passengers was not felt along every rail line and bus route. Metro chief executive Stephanie Wiggins noted during a board of directors meeting last month that the K Line saw a 140% surge in weekday ridership in June and a roughly 200% increase in weekend ridership after the opening of the LAX/Metro Transit Center. Metro has struggled with ridership in recent years, first when the pandemic shuttered transit and then when a spate of violence on rail and buses shook trust in the system. Those numbers started to rebound this year and before June's drop, had reached 90% of pre-pandemic counts. But financial challenges have continued. Metro, which recently approved a $9.4 billion budget, faces a deficit of more than $2.3 billion through 2030. And federal funding for its major Olympics and Paralympics transportation plan to lease thousands of buses remains in flux. Maintaining ridership growth is critical for the the agency. More than 60% of Metro bus riders and roughly 50% of its rail riders are Latino, according to a 2023 Metro survey. The decline in June's ridership was due in part to growing concerns that transit riders would be swept up in immigration raids. Those fears were magnified when a widely shared video showed several residents apprehended at a bus stop in Pasadena. Three of the men who were arrested at the stop by federal agents are plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Trump administration. They spoke earlier this month at a news conference in favor of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals decision to uphold a temporary restraining order against the immigration stops and arrests. Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, a day laborer, said he was taken by unidentified men while waiting at the bus stop to go to work like he did every day. He said that he was placed in a small space without access to a bathroom or adequate food, water and medicine. Vasquez Perdomo said the experience 'changed my life forever' and called for 'justice.' Closures at stations during the raids and D Line construction beneath Wilshire Boulevard also affected June's numbers, according to Metro officials.
