A judge shrugged off ‘some stray violent incidents.’ Los Angeles police sources tell a very different story.
“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.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal. Her latest book is When Race Trumps Merit.
Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
