As a young artist in Romania, Mihai Nicodim had to get approval from a Communist Party commission to show his work.

Smiling portraits of workers and peasants would easily score a place in an art show. Abstract paintings stood less of a chance.

For a chance at freedom, Nicodim swam across the Danube River in 1983, risking capture by Romanian soldiers. A friend met him on the other side and drove him to Italy.

In the United States, he was homeless, then slept on a friend’s couch. He and his wife, Ono, saved money for years before achieving their version of the American dream: an art gallery.

The Nicodim gallery operated in Chinatown and then Culver City before moving to Boyle Heights in early 2015.

But to anti-gentrification activists, the Nicodims are the face of unwanted change. Last month, someone scrawled an obscene reference to “white art” on the gallery’s metal screen door.

On Saturday morning, members of the Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement held a news conference on the steps of the Nicodim gallery. They are incensed by the Los Angeles Police Department’s decision to investigate the graffiti as a hate crimeIt’s another way for the LAPD to criminalize youth and create racial divisions in this community, to allege an anti-white hate crime when they’re out there shooting our youth — people of color,” said Elizabeth Blaney, a Boyle Heights resident and co-director of the community organizing group Union de Vecinos.

Josh Rubenstein, an LAPD spokesman, said that detectives initiated the hate crimes investigation based on the available evidence. Parallels drawn by the activists between the investigation and the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of Jesse Romero by an LAPD officer are unfounded, Rubenstein added.

According to an LAPD account, Romero, 14, had been tagging gang-type graffiti when he ran from officers, then pointed a gun at them.

The Nicodim gallery and several other art galleries targeted by the activists are located in an industrial area between the Los Angeles River and the 101 Freeway. The activists want to see laundromats, supermarkets and child care centers in the properties, which had previously housed businesses such as warehouses, print shops and fish packers.

Amid concerns about rising rents, the activists see the galleries as a harbinger of change, which they fear will end with the working-class, mostly Latino neighborhood becoming a second Arts District.

“You are not the cutting edge of culture,” Walt Senterfitt, a tenants’ rights activist, said of the galleries. “You are the leading edge of gentrification, colonialism and destruction.”

Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of police-shooting victim Philando Castile, urged against violence at protests in the aftermath of his death, which she streamed on Facebook Live using her cell phone during the fatal traffic stop in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, on Wednesday evening.

Reynolds said that she was "baffled" to see some protesters responding to police brutality with more violence.

In St. Paul this weekend, protests forced the closure of Interstate 94. Some participants allegedly threw objects and dropped liquids from overpasses on officers below. Others allegedly directed laser pointers at officers. In Baton Rouge, an officer had his teeth knocked out, according to police.

"Violence is never the key. It’s not acceptable. We have to be able to come together and lead by example," she said. "If we’re not able to stand together and control our emotions then how can we ever expect anyone else in the world to do so

Black Lives Matter protesters chanting “No pride in police” crashed a Toronto Police news conference Friday, where Chief Mark Saunders unveiled a mural honouring the local LGBTQ community.

The mural, in the gay village near the corner of Church and Wood Sts., is meant to celebrate the history, diversity and strength of Toronto’s LGBTQ community, according to a police news release.

But the protesters claim the media event, like the Toronto police chief’s public apology this week for the 1981 bathhouse raids, was a publicity stunt.

They are “PR tools used to mask the reality of police relations amongst the queer and trans community: black people, indigenous people, sex workers et cetera,” said Black Lives Matter co-founder Rodney Diverlus, 26, after disrupting the unveiling.

The reverend and gay rights activist, Brent Hawkes, tried to mediate between Black Lives Matter and the police, to no avail, according to the queer activist and journalist, Andrea Houston, who live tweeted the encounter.

Black Lives Matter is still waiting for the police to meet the demands it made after its tent city protest outside police headquarters on College St. this spring, Diverlus added.