THE NEW MATH
Law enforcement in the age of the Trump dictatorship.
For my mental health, I am less engaged with national news. I get great feedback when I write about the shit going on but I am not Batman. I can’t rush in and fix anything.
That said, I very selectively tune in to the news in controlled ways. Even without diving deep, it’s impossible to avoid hearing about the “riots in LA” that have been going on since Sunday. I am plenty old enough to remember the riots in LA in 1992 and so that was the image I had in my mind. Those riots were truly a city out of control. Even the Black Lives Matter protests which were significant and serious during the pandemic were kind of exaggerated through the lens of today’s media and today’s politics. The BLM protests at their worst were nothing like 1992.
Hell, I am old enough to remember the protests in Selma, Alabama which only started to look like riots because the police were the ones delivering the violence. I remember the president getting involved because the governor would not protect his people when the cops turned against them with brutish violence and killings.
So, my expectations regarding LA were intense.
YouTube TV gives me four screens to view simultaneously on my giant TV. Even as I jumped back and forth between SportsCenter and the Tony Awards trying to avoid the news channels YouTube TV was including, I could not help but see the other screens filled with live streams of the streets of LA and it sure looked scary to me.
Today (Tuesday), I dove in deeper. Here is the new math as of Tuesday night…
Protesters counted by the dozens (five dozen, maybe seven dozen) are occupying about 30 yards of a block in downtown LA and the street is blocked to through traffic. Some of the protestors look thuggish, some are wearing masks, some waving Mexican flags. Some look capable of becoming violent because they clearly chose to look that way.
So, let’s call it 80 scary protestors. They are surrounded by a horseshoe of LAPD police in riot gear who appear to be about 150 cops. Roughly a 2-to-1 ratio. Not seen on camera, the Governor and the Mayor tell the news media that 900 police officers are dedicated to controlling the protest. Roughly a 10-to-1 ratio of at-the-ready cops to protestors who are mulling around in area that is maybe 600 square yards of land.
That red dot shows where the “out of control” protest/riots are happening.
In addition to the 900 cops, 4000 members of the National Guard are directly assigned to this task and 700 MARINES who took an oath to protect the residents of this country from foreign threats are there against their will.
Every major news outlet and plenty of very minor news outlets all have a reporter and a camera person inside the horseshoe with the protestors covering the protest live. I’ll guess 30 people in journalistic roles are sandwiched in between 80 protestors and 150 cops in riot gear. Let’s call it a 1-to-10 ratio of live TV cameras for every 10 protestors.
Something like 5500 other persons with police-like responsibilities are somewhere out of sight but definitely not out of mind for anybody. Well, the Governor has decided to post pictures to show where the National Guard troops that Trump sent in can be found…
The new math suggests that everybody on all sides wants something violent to happen so that they don’t all look foolish. Hey, let’s put an empty cop car in here and hope somebody lights it on fire - that seems to be what is going on here through my lens into one evening’s worth of paying attention.
Bigger picture, Trump wants to declare martial law. Trump is taking carefully thought out strategic steps towards an end game where normal elections are not held in 2026.
80 people in LA who are rightly furious at the actions of ICE are reacting as they should and their reaction is what Trump needs. ICE deportations are not even close to the end game. ICE detainments must get so outrageous that the people are forced to rise up and that lets Trump taking ever more aggressive steps towards cementing his role as a dictator.
The situation in LA is so contained that one TV reporter acknowledged that if he was to walk a few blocks away from the center of all this attention, LA is going about its business just like any other day.
My best guess is that the normal American’s who are trying to peacefully protest against wildly out-of-control detainments by ICE cops have realized that they are feeding Trump’s narrative and decided to ruin his day by staying home. 80 people did not get that memo or maybe they don’t want to pay attention to it.
In fairness, I realize that the size of the protests were bigger on Sunday. But, when I compare the photos and videos all across social media (literally thousands of videos on YouTube) to the actual scope of the events in terms of numbers of protestors and the geographical space within LA that was under some level of duress, it’s underwhelming to say the least.
Good thing some cops left a couple of cars in the middle of the street so that it would be easy for some rowdy protestors to set them on fire. Otherwise, we’d have nothing but flash bomb smoke to make the pictures and videos look like armageddon.
Once again, Trump’s parlor trick is to use a tiny situation to distract the news coverage away from his long game. Once again, the parlor trick works. But, he is getting two-for-one this time. The protest is both a distraction and a critical chess move towards martial law and the end of normal elections.
Trump’s strategy does not fail if the people in the streets grow in numbers and intensity because they refuse to be intimidated. That would be a wet dream for the Donald. Trump’s strategy fails if his extreme over-reaction turns out to be in the face of quiet streets with nobody on them doing anything for the TV cameras to ogle.
Imagine 700 Marines, 4000 National Guards, and 900 cops just staring at each other. Kind of makes me think about John Lennon’s song.
Trump is a dictator forcing all of us to feel tremendous pressure to do something. And, Trump is a dictator hoping that we will. I remain astounded by the number of anti-Trump people who still say the man is an idiot.
This is what happens to my damned brain when I tune back in for just a couple of hours.