A note was sent home in October 1995 from my daughter's Los Angeles preschool. The verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial, which had been going on for more than eight months, was expected the next day, and the school was informing parents that they understood if they wanted to keep their children home. While this might have seemed cryptic someplace other than L.A., everyone who had been in the city in 1992—when Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers caught on tape beating Rodney King were declared not guilty—understood how tensions you did not know existed (or were not going to admit existed) could ignite in an instant.
Such tensions have become familiar over the past five years of seemingly nonstop protest. Screaming, fires, pepper spray, and homemade explosive devices are predictable features of street protests and are also easy to exploit and thus profit from. Provoke the other side's ire hard enough, and they will prove your point for you.
There is little mystery as to why President Donald Trump chose L.A. as the proving ground for his hardline immigration policies. There are more undocumented people in L.A.—an estimated 925,000—than in any other American city. But it was also about the irresistible opportunity to smack down those who oppose the president, who consider his policies despicable and dangerous, and are not quiet about it; from local officials to movie stars to the guy who has made it his mission to get Trump's star off the Hollywood Walk of Fame, to Trump's favored whipping boy Gov. Gavin Newsom, with a head of good hair all his own, to L.A. mayor Karen Bass, whose bumbling of the city's recent devastating wildfires makes her an easy target. Plus, there is no shinier national stage than L.A. on which Trump might exert supremacy. No brighter spotlight, one that, should all hell break loose, could be trained on the constituency turning on each other, and on the city itself.
