By: Heather Mac Donald – wsj.com – June 19, 2025

A judge shrugged off ‘some stray violent incidents.’ Los Angeles police sources tell a very different story.

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. Moreover, damage was “primarily” to property, Judge Breyer wrote, as if that diminishes the firestorm of destruction that has put on death watch hundreds of mom-and-pop stores, hipster restaurants, neighborhood bars and small arts organizations in Los Angeles’s long-suffering downtown. Officers were injured under the barrage of weaponry launched against them. It was sheer luck that those injuries weren’t life-threatening. (The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has stayed Judge Breyer’s injunction; it should make that stay permanent, since the injunction misreads controlling precedent.)

Oh, but not all of Los Angeles was a war zone, the Democratic establishment argues; the majority of its neighborhoods weren’t undergoing a riot. The 1992 riots were much more extensive. Therefore, federal backup was unnecessary and authoritarian.

But the seriousness of a riot shouldn’t be measured against the worst case. Civic violence is almost always relatively localized. The issue is our tolerance for it and how urgently it should be put down. Should Mr. Trump have waited to see if the locals could eventually bring the situation under control? We can answer that question with the advantage of hindsight. On June 8, the day after the activation order, the rioting had gotten so bad that Police Chief Jim McDonnell put the LAPD on tactical alert, canceling all time off and instituting shifts as long as 16 hours. On June 10, three days after the activation order, Mayor Karen Bassannounced an emergency curfew for downtown, since the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were unable to quell the violence. Still the disorder continued.

Contrary to the media narrative, National Guard soldiers aren’t engaging in domestic law enforcement. They aren’t patrolling the streets and arresting looters and vandals. Their sole purpose is to stand guard on federal buildings and protect federal officers. This is known as “command presence.” A line of defense around federal property creates one fewer target for local law enforcement to worry about, freeing up LAPD officers and sheriff’s deputies to focus on violence elsewhere.

Even so, the deployment of LAPD officers to the downtown riots left their own divisions even more understaffed than usual in the post-George Floyd era. There were half as many patrol cars on the streets of Los Angeles’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods than there typically would be. One particularly violent division saw as many homicides in the first seven days of tactical alert as it usually sees in a month. So overwhelmed was the department that when driverless Waymo vehicles were being summoned to their autos-da-fé, the Los Angeles Fire Department didn’t respond. There weren’t enough cops available to protect them.

Mr. Trump can thank California’s long history of defiance of the law for giving him a chance to display his law-and-order bona fides. The sanctuary state released thousands of illegal-alien criminals back into the streets over the past three years. The state’s progressive district attorneys, in the name of racial justice, declined to prosecute thieves, vandals and suspects who resisted arrest. All that reinforced a sense of entitlement to break the law. But Mr. Trump’s opponents were equally opportunistic. They seized on his response to validate the longstanding charge that, as Mr. Newsom put it, “democracy is under assault right before our eyes.”

The unhinged response to the federal backup exemplifies what the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down.” To portray Mr. Trump’s actions as dictatorial, his opponents normalize lawlessness. A post on social media expressed the blasé response to the violence among Southern California’s sophisticated ironists. A viral video of people dancing in a graffiti-splattered intersection bore the caption: “The ‘insurrectionists’ are starting to violently line dance in the streets of L.A. Please Dear Leader, send in the Marines! Save us before more traitors join them.”

One can argue about how many projectiles, looted stores and street fights are too many. It isn’t unreasonable to respond: one. There is more danger to society from tolerating the breakdown of law and order than from responding to that breakdown with all legal means.

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Source: Is Rioting Acceptable? If So, How Much? – WSJ