YWCA Pasadena’s Racial Justice Award Recipient Dr. Melina Abdullah Arrested

YWCA Pasadena-Foothill Valley’s 2016 Racial Justice Award recipient Dr. Melina Abdullah was arrested on Monday for refusing to leave the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters lobby during an “unlawful assembly” protesting the weekend shooting of a black man by Los Angeles police, according to multiple media reports.

Abdullah, a professor and chair of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, is slated to headline the local YWCA’s 14th Annual Women for Racial Justice Breakfast on October 17 at the Pasadena Hilton Hotel.

Abdullah was arrested alongside Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Both women were released several hours after being arrested.

The pair along with a number of demonstrators were at LAPD headquarters to mount a protest during a press conference conducted by Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck to address two fatal police shootings that took place over the weekend.

On Saturday, 18-year-old Carnell Snell, Jr. was killed by Los Angeles police after a car chase and on Sunday, an unidentified Hispanic man was shot by police in South Los Angeles.

Abdullah told LAist that she became “aware of how they [police] were engaging in the process of double assassination — first killing the body of Carnell Snell, and then assassinating his character. We know that LAPD continues to kill our people and then justifies the killings with whatever they think makes those murders justifiable.”

According to Abdullah, the press conference was behind closed doors and the public did not have access, so the police told them to leave the area.

“They demanded that we leave, but it’s a public building and we have the right to make our voices heard. As they issued the dispersal order, they kept shifting where they wanted us to disperse from and where they wanted us to disperse to,” LAist quotes Abdullah as saying. “We’re not going to just submit to the will of the police that continue to kill us.”

The YWCA’s Women for Racial Justice Breakfast typically brings together hundreds of Pasadena’s most influential members of the business, civic, and philanthropic communities to share in the YWCA’s efforts to promote and support racial justice.