Swastika-wearing agitator makes profane gestures at LAPD officials

A notorious City Hall agitator displaying a large swastika disrupted a meeting of the LAPD’s Police Commission on Tuesday — frequently giving the middle figure to officials gathered to discuss the city’s crimefighting efforts.

The man, Armando Herman, took a seat toward the front of the public gallery as the Board of Commissioners and LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell spoke at their weekly meeting at the department’s headquarters in Downtown LA.

Herman, 59, of Hacienda Heights, is known for peppering public meetings with hateful statements. In 2023, he was slapped with a restraining order barring him from attending meetings of the LA Board of Supervisors for three years after he sent threatening emails to the board.   

That didn’t stop Herman from showing up at the Police Commission meeting Tuesday, where he regularly flipped the bird at the dais while donning a crudely scrawled black swastika around his neck. He also made other gestures to the commissioners while fidgeting in his seat.

A spokesman for the LAPD declined to comment on the matter.

On Friday, Herman attended a City Council meeting and screamed at councilmembers, hurling anti-gay slurs and yelling, “You stupid f—k!” He was eventually escorted out of the meeting by police.

“I’m a known activist. I continue to come back and advocate,” Herman told The California Post on Tuesday.

The former LA special-education teacher described the swastika as “my thunderbird,” claiming that he wears it in protest to show support for the First Amendment.

“Some people find the the language offensive. I know the line, or the threshold, of my First Amendment rights,” he said.

The weekly Police Commission meetings are frequently disrupted and sometimes shut down completely by agitators shouting officials down.

The Commission’s new president, Rasha Gerges Shields, struggled to keep the meeting orderly on Tuesday as multiple speakers took to the microphone to curse out cops during the public comment period.

“Just understand that this is a public meeting,” Shields said. “And even if we do not agree with the speech that is being said, we have to allow it. And hate speech, unfortunately.”

Herman wandered out of Tuesday’s meeting after about an hour, before the public comment portion began.

He has a track record of getting kicked out of public meetings and suing the city. He told the Post last week that he was kicked out of a neighborhood council meeting and went to court to protest his removal.

His antics last year inspired the City Council to introduce a new rule where audience members could be removed from meetings for repeatedly uttering the N-word or the C-word.

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