December 27, 2021

Members of the LAPD investigate the scene of a shooting at a Burlington store in North Hollywood. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Monday, Dec. 27. I’m Justin Ray. By now, you have heard that the Los Angeles Police Department killed a 14-year-old girl at a Burlington clothing store in North Hollywood last week, only a few days before Christmas. The victim has been identified as Valentina Orellana-Peralta. The teenager was in a fitting room with her mother trying on dresses for a quinceañera, an LAPD source confirmed. Officers were responding to a report of an assault with a deadly weapon at the store. When they arrived, authorities encountered a man they said was assaulting someone, and they opened fire, according to the LAPD. It was not immediately clear what prompted the officers to shoot. The man was taken into custody and died at the scene, a spokesperson for the department said. When officers fired their weapons, their gunfire penetrated a wall, which killed the girl in the dressing room. Authorities said that they found a metal cable next to the suspect whom officers were confronting, but that no gun was recovered. The case has caused an uproar, with many citing the shooting as the latest example of officers being too quick to draw and fire their weapons. How often are officers fatally shooting people? Here are some numbers, and how they compare to previous years. LAPD officers shot 27 people, killing seven, in all of 2020, and shot 26 people, killing 12, in 2019, The Times reported. Officers shot 33 people in 2018. The 26 shootings in 2019 marked a 30-year low in the number of LAPD shootings in a given year, and a dramatic drop in such shootings from a high of more than 100 per year in the early 1990s. As of Friday, LAPD officers had shot at least 37 people in 2021, killing 17 of them — substantially more than they shot or killed in either of the last two years. They have killed four people recently, with two men killed in separate incidents on Saturday, and one man on Christmas Eve. An LAPD estimate earlier this year, when police had shot 30 people, indicated about one-third of them were exhibiting signs of mental illness at the time. LAPD Chief Michel Moore promised to release body-camera and surveillance video from the North Hollywood incident by Monday. More stories about the shooting: “It was a horrible scene,” said one witness who was at the store. “The parents never imagined their daughter would die here.” “I’m being assured this is getting the highest attention in terms of investigation.” How authorities have responded to the incident. “How can they shoot crazy like that?” The shooting has sparked widespread anguish and outrage, particularly in a year in which shootings by Los Angeles police officers increased after years of declines.