A crowd of protesters disrupted a Los Angeles city council meeting on Wednesday, demanding the resignation of two members who were recently caught making racist remarks.
The approximately two dozen demonstrators told the council they would refuse to leave until councilmen Gil Cedillo and Kevin De León stepped down. They were eventually escorted out by police. Councilwoman Nury Martinez resigned as president of the panel two weeks ago — and eventually stepped down from the council altogether — over her role in the inflammatory conversation, which was secretly recorded and posted online by an unknown person. The police issued a dispersal order to get the demonstrators to leave, the Los Angeles Times noted.
Likely in response to pressure from protesters, the city council voted unanimously Wednesday to censure the two remaining guilty members for their involvement in the conversation. In order to censure a member of the council, the individual must have demonstrated “gross failure to meet the high standards of personal and professional conduct.” Cedillo and De León still hold their positions.
The censure vote demonstrates that “these comments are unacceptable to us and that we disassociate ourselves from them as a body,” councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson told the publication.
Councilman Bob Blumenfield said the members showed a neglect for the people they are supposed to serve. “This censure isn’t just about the offensive words that they used, and it isn’t just about their attempt to take power from a protected class,” he told the LA Times. “It is also about their abdication of their duty as council members to represent all of their constituents.”
In the audio recording from a year ago, Cedillo, Martinez, De León, as well as Ron Herrera, the president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, made racially charged insults about other city officials, their family members, and the municipalities’ political demographics.
Martinez called a white colleague’s two-year-old black son a “changuito,” Spanish for “little monkey,” and said “he needs a beatdown.” De León derided the child’s adoptive father, Mike Bonin, as the council’s “fourth Black member” and claimed he showed off his black son like a luxury purse.
“As someone who believes deeply in the empowerment of communities of color, I recognize my comments undercut that goal,” Martinez said in her apology. She and assured that “going forward, reconciliation will be my priority.”
De León claimed to “regret appearing to condone and even contribute to certain insensitive comments made about a colleague and his family in private. I’ve reached out to that colleague personally. On that day, I fell short of the expectations we set for our leaders — and I will hold myself to a higher standard.”