LAPD Chief William Bratton was on the panel as KPCC reporter Patricia Nazario brought many in the audience to tears describing her encounter with a Metro Division officer (and his club) while she covered the MacArthur Park melee on May 1. The panel of reporters who got pushed around by the cops that day was a highlight of last weekend's National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference in San Jose. Daniel Hernandez blogs it, quoting first from a Daily News story:

"Choking back tears, radio reporter Patricia Nazario described officers jabbing her with a baton, then knocking her over. 'I have traveled by myself. I have been to Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica. I have filed stories from those places and I have never had confrontations like this with the police. Nothing ever so frightening,' said Nazario."

It was very intense to watch Nazario, still shaken, describe how she turned to try to identify the officer striking her and realized she could not see his face and that he wore no identification, making him as anonymous as the rest of the cops standing down on the crowd. "This guy could kill me and he could get away with it," she recalled thinking. Bratton sat three chairs away, stone-faced.

Hernandez also blogs with dismay on hipsters discovering the Gold Room in Echo Park.

Photo: AP via Daniel Hernandez