Protesters targeted by Carmen Trutanich have their say

Today, I’d like to introduce you to several citizens who could spend a year in jail, on your dime, for the crime of staging protests.

But first, the back story:

On Feb. 11, The Times reported that L.A. City Atty. Carmen Trutanich intended to get tough with dozens of protesters who’ve committed civil disobedience in the service of one cause or another and possibly lock them up. I innocently questioned the wisdom of this in a posting on The Times’ website, under a headline that read:

“Is Carmen Trutanich L.A.’s Hosni Mubarak?”

A few minutes later, my phone rang.

“This is Hosni Mubarak,” the caller said.

It was Trutanich, who insisted there’s no new get-tough policy, despite the claims of critics. He said he’ll look at each case individually and follow the law. But he was still talking tough.

Jump up and down on the sidewalk if you want to protest something, he said. But if you block traffic, get violent, have a record or demonstrate without a permit, don’t think the city attorney is going to stand by and do nothing. He added, however, that for most protesters, “Jail time is unlikely.”

But some of the protesters aren’t taking anything for granted. Their cases, delayed for months, are now scheduled to be heard March 8.

I met with some of the accused, and you can be the judge of whether they’re noble idealists or misguided desperadoes:

Julie Hey, 35, has worked as a family therapist and school counselor and hopes to make that her career. She’s now an administrative assistant at a law firm, and she says she believes “protest is a duty.”

Hey was arrested at Wilshire Boulevard and Highland Avenue last July during a protest against Arizona’s immigration law. She and others had chained themselves together to block the intersection near the offices of an international security consulting firm. For Hey and others, protesting government policy isn’t enough — they take on corporations that lobby for those policies and profit from them.

“I would say working with immigrant students and families in schools made this an issue I had to take a stand on,” said Hey. “I’ve had mothers who are undocumented stay in abusive relationships because they’re afraid to report it for fear of getting deported.

“I’ve had students who are really smart, but undocumented, with no options. When I heard about the law in Arizona, that would penalize people like those I knew so well, I felt a real responsibility.”

Alma Soto, 31, was arrested with Hey. A Cal State L.A. grad, she just completed a job as an organizer for hotel union workers. She is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who came north, illegally, to work. Like thousands, they were granted amnesty by President Reagan.

“My mother took me to my first protest,” said Soto, a teen at the time. The cause was California’s Proposition 187, which would have denied public benefits such as schooling to illegal immigrants.

Soto believes American economic and foreign policy have helped create class divides in the U.S., as well as many of the conditions that drive people to the U.S. illegally. The idea that she should get a permit to speak her mind about all of that strikes her as ludicrous, as is the suggestion that she shouldn’t block traffic.

“I know what it’s like to be stuck in traffic when you don’t know what’s going on. But people in this country…ought to be uncomfortable with a lot more than they are.”

Leigh Shelton, 26, a hotel union coordinator, was also arrested at Wilshire and Highland. She traveled through Mexico and Latin America when younger and saw hungry, dirt-poor families move to the cities from rural farms and then continue into the U.S. For a while, she worked with some of them as a caterer.

“I met this woman named Christie, who came here from Oaxaca without her husband and kids because they had lost their land,” Shelton said. Christie was paid less than Shelton and once was cheated out of pay. She slept on the floor of a trailer that she shared with four other people and sent home every dollar she could spare.

“Those images — L.A. is the epicenter of it,” Shelton said.

Hamid Khan, 54, is the former head of the South Asian Network, an advocacy group. He grew up in Pakistan, where he got his first taste of protest, and was arrested last May while blocking traffic at a downtown L.A. federal building that houses foreign detainees.

To Khan, he was protesting nothing less than evil global forces, including racism, that make a few people rich at the expense of the many. Protest, he said, is a precious thing — a tool for change and for social justice.

“Even the formation of the United States is based on protest,” Khan said.

So here’s a question for Trutanich: Should anyone have to spend a single day in jail for participating in the proud American tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience?

As the bumper sticker says, if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

steve.lopez@latimes.com