“We don’t have s— under control,” a Los Angeles Police Department commander told me on Sunday. “It’s a godsend that the National Guard and the Marines are here.” Officers on the street felt the same way, though the LAPD forbids them to express that view in public, the commander said.
There are two different pictures of what happened in Los Angeles—the official one from California’s elected leaders and the media, and the ground-level view from law enforcement. On Saturday—a week after President Trump activated the National Guard and six days after Gov. Gavin Newsom told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that local law enforcement officers were “sufficient to maintain order”—a crowd broke into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center downtown to liberate the detainees. The vandals overpowered the skeletal crew of National Guard soldiers, using improvised bombs made from M-80 firecrackers, nails and broken glass. Eventually about 100 law-enforcement officers arrived to put down the attempted jailbreak, but not before damage to the facility.
The day before, according to the commander I interviewed, a mob of several dozen surrounded two ICE agents taking an illegal alien into custody on Vermont Boulevard. Six men jumped out of a truck and grabbed the handcuffed suspect from the back of the ICE van, threw the suspect into their truck and fled. The ICE agents gave chase, but without sirens or lights, the pursuit was futile. Neither of these incidents was reported in the press. The commander said the LAPD didn’t put out an alert for its officers to apprehend the fleeing abduction squad, presumably to avoid violating Los Angeles’s sanctuary law, which bans using city personnel for federal immigration enforcement.
The LAPD commander I spoke to views California’s sanctuary policies and its opposition to the National Guard deployment as equally misguided. “It would be safer if we could work with ICE,” he said. “We should block off the street to assist their agents in making arrests.” Mr. Trump should provide more soldiers, not fewer, the commander insisted. They could then walk the streets with local officers during this time of anarchy.
The official narrative—that Los Angeles is and has been under control since the first ICE officer was targeted, that the “protests” were “largely peaceful” and no grounds for larger concern—raises the question: How much rioting is acceptable? A partial inventory of the recent activities now deemed consistent with overall public order: launching commercial grade fireworks loaded with nails and broken glass at police in the hope of blinding and maiming them; hurling Molotov cocktails at officers; stoning a squad car with a female officer inside it; dropping cement blocks, scooters and grocery carts from freeway overpasses onto California Highway Patrol officers; commandeering part of a freeway; blocking intersections with flaming dumpsters; defacing city landmarks with graffiti; smashing into and looting retailers including Adidas, Apple, CVS, T-Mobile, jewelry stores and a gasoline station.
These were just “some stray violent incidents” according to Judge Charles Breyer, who on June 12 enjoined Messrs. Trump and Hegseth from continuing to deploy members of the National Guard in California. {snip}
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