The LA (Police) Riots

These Protesters Aren't The Ones Destroying America

For premium subscribers: the monthly AMA will happen tomorrow, June 11th, at 8:30 PM ET — I’ll be sending an email and posting a link shortly.

This article also appears in The Nation

Consensus reality surrounding the LA protests seems to be as follows: while Trump’s decision to send 2,000 National Guard troops, then 700 Marines, then 2,000 more National Guard troops to Los Angeles is making the situation worse, the situation was bad before they got there.

“Pockets of LA descending into chaos,” an ABC news anchor declared in an extremely typical news segment on Monday. “Protesters setting cars on fire, dumping bikes and scooters on police cruisers on the highway. Law enforcement firing hundreds of flash bangs and non-lethal projectiles and making dozens of arrests.” In the background, footage from the protest plays: cops beating protesters with truncheons, tear gas, a car on fire. A shirtless masked man waving a Mexican flag atop a wrecked Waymo, cops firing into a crowd at close range. The only active violence in these clips comes from the cops, but no matter. That fire is what you should be worried about: the fire and nothing else.

While some organizations reported from inside the protest themselves, most did not: they set up camp behind the police line, or reported using drone footage, or simply asked the cops what to say. “Dozens of people were arrested Sunday and accused of attempted murder, arson and other crimes during a day of violence and protests in Los Angeles,” NBC Los Angeles declared in an article based exclusively on LAPD sources. It’s an understandable decision on their part. Just look at Lauren Tomasi, a reporter for the Australian Channel Nine news service who got “caught in the crossfire” and struck with a rubber bullet while reporting, by which I mean an LA police officer aimed directly at the reporter from close range and shot her. She reports being “sore, but OK,” which is more than photographer Nick Stern can say: the day before, a “less lethal” round punctured his leg and required emergency surgery. As of Tuesday morning, the LA Press Club documented over 30 injuries to members of the press. Easier and safer to parrot police talking points than face down their guns.

I spent Sunday from about 4:00 PM until very late inside the LA protests, and this is what I saw. Yes, cars were set on fire in one part of the sprawling, multi-block protest. Yes, fireworks were launched at cops—a handful, sporadically. But, it should be noted, these were launched long after these police officers began unloading flash bang after flash bang, rubber bullet after rubber bullet, into a largely peaceful crowd. (Flash bangs are stun grenades that produce a flash of light and deafening noise.)

The idea that cops were just reacting to protester provocation is absurd. Cops occupied intersections in an attempt to split the protest, then occasionally charged the protest lines that surrounded them to force the crowds to temporarily retreat. These assaults seemed unrelated to protester action or lack thereof. At one point, while the cops were unloading round after round of blue-tipped rubber bullets into a crowd hunkered down behind a barricade, a different group of protesters approached from the side and threw a firework into the center of the police line. The cops turned their fire against the group, which ran off, but did not pursue them. Thirty seconds later, the cops were back to shooting at the barricade.

We have heard a lot about the assault of police officers during these protests. Why haven’t we seen it? Where’s the body cam footage showing protesters injuring cops, striking them, putting them out of commission? I saw a police officer struck by a water bottle thrown by protesters in a barrage launched around 7:30 PM after those protesters spent hours absorbing “less lethal” rounds and being deafened by flash bangs, but that’s about it. Meanwhile, we’ve got drone footage of a mounted officer using his horse to trample a protester, who lies prone on the ground, surrounded by mounted police. We’ve got cops beating protesters with truncheons, cops deploying tear gas, cops bringing box after box of ammunition to the line so they could fire again and again and again into crowds of protesters exercising tremendous restraint throughout the day.

When I arrived on the scene, the cops were seriously outnumbered — thousands of protesters, a couple hundred cops. If there had truly been a riot, those cops would have found themselves overrun, disarmed, brutalized. But it was a protest. So they were fine.

And yet, the anti-protester framing is relentless, even from otherwise balanced sources. “Demonstrators protesting the raids have clashed with police in Los Angeles, Paramount and neighboring Compton,” NPR reported on Monday. Did they? Or did police clash with the demonstrators?

Let’s not forget why these protests are happening in the first place. ICE is conducting extralegal abductions of law-abiding individuals for the crime of maybe, possibly being undocumented. We can’t know their status for sure, because there’s no due process. On my ride from the airport to downtown LA, my Uber driver gestured to a neighborhood along Route 110. This whole area is immigrants, she said. They aren’t coming out of their houses. The grocery store her mother goes to is virtually empty. Like a third of LA’s population, this driver was not born in America: she came here from Argentina when she was six. She’s lived here ever since. She has a job, and a child with a man who was born here. But that’s not enough to protect people anymore.

As the driver pointed out — as protesters around me would later point out — the President’s not wrong: LA is under invasion. But the invading force isn’t the immigrants who live and work here. It’s ICE attempting to abduct children from elementary schools by claiming their parents authorized the pick-up, or rolling up to Home Depot to abduct people doing the most American thing imaginable: pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, hiring themselves out as day laborers to make a better life for themselves and their families. It’s the Marines deployed against their fellow citizens by an administration that’s fantasized about quelling First Amendment activity by force for half a decade now. These are the un-American hordes descending on Los Angeles.

Trump can call these protests invasions all he wants: I know what I saw. As the sun began to set, riot cops from the LA county sheriff’s department showed up on trucks, fully kitted out with shields and gas masks. The rapidly-shrinking protest saw the writing on the wall and, rather than confront these militarized enforcers, turned and walked away, into the night and into the city. For hours they marched, blasting mariachi music and old-school West Coast rap and chanting their simple, reasonable demand: “No ICE in LA!”

As the protesters marched, they chanted something else: “Whose streets? Our streets!” It wasn’t a declaration of war or a challenge to others who might lay claim to the city, but a statement of obvious fact. As these several hundred protesters marched the wrong way up a one-way street, completely stopping traffic, an overwhelming number of drivers honked and cheered. They rolled down their windows to fist bump the protesters and take pictures and shout their approval.

This is America at its best. Not the sadistic cruelty and police brutality on display for days, weeks, months, years, but people waving Mexican flags, proud of where they come from and defiant in the face of persecution, blasting Kendrick Lamar as their fellow Angelenos cheer. Singing along. “It’s gonna be alright. It’s gonna be alright.”

Towards the end of the night, as the march began to wind down, someone rattled the doors of a Nike store until they ripped clean off their hinges and fell to the pavement. After a moment’s hesitation, protesters began to loot the store. There were cheers, but this moment marked the end of the evening. Even before the cops showed up for the final push, the final declaration of unlawful assembly, the final arrests, the mood soured and shattered. Verbal altercations broke out. People started to peel off. It was an unfortunate end to the evening. It was also a unique event. No other store was touched. These protesters didn’t march through LA to destroy it. They marched to show the world, their city, and themselves that they will not stand down in the face of federal invasion.

The march left graffiti in its wake: on windows, on walls, on the sides of buses. Paint washes off, it does no significant damage. Deporting children who are both US citizens and cancer patients? Shoving a sobbing mother and her children into an unmarked van for the crime of showing up to a court appointment? Brutalizing a union leader for attempting to peacefully stop these atrocities? The damage from things like this cannot be undone, even if the courts release all of these people.

Anyone focused on something as relatively harmless as graffiti, or on a single looted store, or on the five cars set ablaze in a protest composed of thousands, has lost the plot completely. Tactically speaking, these isolated acts were a mistake. They create an opportunity to take photos of scary-looking people in front of walls of fire and then disseminate it again and again and again to portray the entire movement as would-be arsonists and murderers that must be crushed by any means necessary to save the city itself—which is what has now happened.

But let’s be clear: the protesters are not provoking the administration when they engage in these tactics. The administration provoked these protesters. They introduced violence into the equation when they began abducting people off the streets without due process, when they gleefully posted “ASMR videos” of human beings illegally put onto planes in shackles or created a Miyazaki AI photo of a woman weeping in handcuffs; they introduced it when their masked goons broke into a congressman’s office on suspicion of “harboring rioters” and when they arrested a sitting mayor for carrying out his duties of office. The administration introduced violence and lawlessness into the situation. They cannot pretend to be surprised when some Americans respond in kind.

And when the media reports on protests like this as though the demonstrators are the aggressors who pose a danger to the cities they’re in, they are complicit in the Trump administration’s destruction of American liberty. This is true regardless of how scathing the rest of the article may be. What option, other than protest, do the American people have, at this point? The Democrats have abdicated their responsibility; they send taco trucks to the White House but refuse to meaningfully impede the machinations of this regime. They could grind the government to a halt, they could hold up every routine procedure, as Mitch McConnell did in 2008. Instead, they grandstand and look to the midterms, a year and a half away.

The government has failed to protect us, the government is actively oppressing us, the government has rendered itself the enemy. Not all forms of resistance are advisable, but at this point they are understandable. The regime wants to shatter the social contract? Very well. But that decision cuts both ways.

As Trump moves inexorably towards the martial law he’s longed for all this time, as the unrest spreads to more cities, as the administration’s war on the American people goes kinetic, it will be tempting to victim-blame. To equivocate. To find some reason that the protesters deserve what’s coming. They don’t. We don’t. We deserve an America that lives up to its ancient and never-realized promise: land of the free, home of the brave, defender of human rights for every single human within our borders. Ideally, we would not have to fight our own government to get back onto that path. More and more, it’s looking like we do.