L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti Promises ‘Mental Health Care’ for Being a ‘Young Black Man’

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti attempted to appease protesters on Tuesday evening, delivering a speech from City Hall as hundreds of “Black Lives Matter” demonstrators surrounded his home several miles away.

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He referred to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, last week as a “lynching.” He added that he understood that “Peace isn’t just built as a request, but it is earned when we embrace the ideal of justice.”

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Garcetti added that he wanted to talk about “whether we make a decision collectively, not just to answer the snuffing out of a life, the lynching of a man in Minneapolis, and the collective death that we have seen pile on, and pile one, and pile on, until people wonder what black lives mean, what black bodies — whether they are valued.”

Calling the crisis a “moment of opportunity, and of hope, and of change,” Garcetti recounted his experiences kneeling among the Black Lives Matter protesters, and said he wanted people to understand that “at the end of the day the story is about the pain that people carry the day that people are born, from the trauma that are visited on their ancestors.”

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He pledged to spend more money on programs aimed at “trauma-based recovery for trauma and people who carry trauma.”

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He called for a “summer of peace,” promising jobs for young people and peaceful spaces, and pledging to provide the “mental health care that we need to deal with what that feels like, day after day after day, to be a young black man who doesn’t know why people don’t trust him, look at him that way, feel that way every moment they inhabit a body.”

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