PASADENA - For three days in a row, community activist Jasmine Abdullah Richards has posted live videos of encounters with Pasadena Police Officers. I was home last night and looked at my Facebook feed and saw that the car she was in had been pulled over and she was being harassed by officers. The only reason the car was approached was because Jasmine was in it. All of the incidents happened in the same neighborhood and involved the same officers.



I asked Jasmine where she was during her live feed and she let me know. My concern about this matter goes deep because the neighborhood is the one I live in. They had Jasmine and to others hemmed up just two blocks away from my home so I was there in no time.

A male officer patted Jasmine down once, but I saw when the female officer arrived and she searched Jasmine's body for at least five minutes. It was ridiculous, disrespectful, and invasive. Was Jasmine giving it back to the officers verbally? Yes, she was. Does Jasmine have the right to give it to them verbally? Yes, she does.

What I learned from Jasmine last night was that if the police are going to troll her and be wherever she is, then she is going to let them know how she feels about not only their unwelcomed presence but the way they deal with the residents in this neighborhood as a whole.



There were seven cars on the scene at first. When they realized Jasmine had no weapons. They weren't drinking. They weren't smoking marijuana and none of the occupants of the vehicle were on probation or parole. Well, Jasmine is on informal probation and she doesn't report to a probation officer because the trumped-up charges for felony lynching the PPD had given her were overturned in appellant court.



In the end, the police impounded Jasmine's friend's car for expired tags. They made them take all of their things out of the car (Mercedes Benz) and called a tow truck. Just know that tow-truck drivers are an extension of the police department. It's all a money game. When they tow your car the city gets paid and the tow-truck company gets paid, when they could have left the car parked on the street and gave him until the next day to get his tags straight.



We here at the Pasadena Black Pages have been trying to help bridge the gap between the police and Northwest Pasadena, but it's hard when there are some officers that literally troll certain people in the community. They have it to a point where the kids can't really play in La Pintoresca Park without seeing a police presence. Every day they are there, not communicating, but aggressively staring at the kids and teens in the park, trying to evoke a confrontation. The reason Jasmine approaches the police when they enter the park is because they don't do that at Del Mar Park or Hamilton Park. There aren't killings or drug-dealing going on in La Pintoresca Park. Teens from the neighborhood hang out there like they have been doing since before some of these officers were even born. Now they are here terrorizing a community that has been doing just fine for over 50 years.



Watch Jasmine and if you see the PPD pulling her over or interacting with her, pull out your camera and start filming because what they are doing to her is trying to get her in a position of vulnerability seclusion so they can do what they want to her. I really believe that. She can't ride in a car without being flagged and stopped. That's not right and that's called harassment and the PPD are using intimidation tactics to get under her skin, but as a community, we can't allow that to happen. The physical trolling of Jasmine Adbullah Richards has to stop.

