On Protester Violence In L.A.

The same old song and it is tiresome and misleading.

June 9, 2025

By Marc Cooper

Please remember that watching anything on TV, especially high-emotion crowds, you are looking through the reverse end of a high powered telescope. Just like 12 years ago during the clashes in Ferguson MO, the non stop coverage seemed like the whole city was aflame.

In fact, about 99% of the protest and police activity, the arson, the arrests, the looting actually took place in one three bock stretch of the small city. But news cameras are always focused like narrow laser beams on where “the action is.” Further, most TV reporters know very little about the bigger picture of state and national politics but can repeat by heart the usual slogans about “violent elements, attacking police, and setting cars on fire.”

The weekend clashes in Los Angeles are on a much bigger scale than Ferguson. And, as someone who supports these protests, I will readily state that a certain amount of vandalism and property destruction is indeed taking place. And, yes, this sort of violence does in fact help bolster Trump’s lies that L.A. has been “occupied” by malicious migrants and only army troops can “liberate” it.

The newscasters on Sunday had live cams running for hours with very little actually happening and they —as expected and as they always so— filled the void by chattering about the scattered incidents that the cameras were narrow casting. Makes for good TV but also for a shitty representation of the greater picture.

The minor acts of violence, and they have been minor, that we saw this weekend and will probably see more of this week is not coming from outside agitators, nor from professional vandals, nor from a foreign invasion.

The violence is a product of RAGE. A rage that has been building for months and years against an addled dictatorial President who if I remember correctly pardoned 1600 criminals from January 6th, many of whom committed ghastly acts of violence against uniformed police and engaged in horrific property destruction around and inside the U.S. Capitol. The Trump administration lacks all moral credibility in condemning the violence it is being met with.

As a veteran of the 60’s street battles and as a journalist who has covered civil disorder across the globe, I know that peaceful, orderly civil disobedience is much more effective politically than the somewhat chaotic protests we have seen this week. But I am a 74 year old retired university professor with 60 years of experience in social justice movements.

I am not a 20 year old kid living in some of the poorest communities in Los Angeles where the LAPD has acted as an occupying force since its founding and is viewed as a lurking predator. I am far from the state violence of trying to live on food stamps and watching masked ICE agents rumble into my neighborhood intent on capturing my neighbors or relatives. Nor do I any longer retain much of the indignant idealism I had in 1968 that that enraged me when it was betrayed…much of that idealism still hotly burning among the younger protesters. Nor do I — or the protesters— have a noble, active. elected political leadership we can count on for support.

Not have I ever seen great movements of liberation and self-determination anywhere in the world that were 100% non-violent. Never. Anywhere. By definition these movements are battling oppression and oppression generates rage no matter how mature and wise the leadership of those movements might be.

There is massive violence in daily life in Los Angeles where a vast majority of the residents are not Instagram celebrities, where neighborhood squabbles are sometimes settled by gunfire and where, even in the creamy neighborhoods of Beverly Hills the entitled youth are encouraged to participate in a dog-eat-dog ethos in a battle to be the MOST successful and the kid with newest Beemer. Not exactly violence but a lot of ego-driven stress,

That is now compounded and greatly aggravated by a political leadership in Washington that freely threatens abuse and often frames simple political disputes with the language of warfare — as to be expected from an asshole president who is also a convicted felon.

Nor is the violence symmetrical. Tossing a bottle or a firecracker at a phalanx of battle-dressed federal and local officers pales before the threat of violence they emit wearing helmets, shields, body armor, side-arms, long rifles, tasers, zip ties, batons, tear gas and pepper ball launchers, pepper spray, and in some cases war-worthy long guns.

Violence is ICE, deploying dozens of rough and tumble masked thugs, disembarking from armored carriers, knocking down doors and smashing windows to arrest without warrant simple day laborers, gardeners, cooks and nannies who are the backbone of the Los Angeles labor force. And then watching the wretched president of the U.S. and his sycophants on TV denounce your community, denounce you, and your friends as foreign invaders. That in itself is an act of despicable mass violence.

I am actually surprised that there hasn’t been more violence from the protesters because I know what level of burning rage they are experiencing.

I don’t encourage any protesters to engage in violence. I don’t condone it nor oppose it as that would be as pointless as raging against the tides who are indifferent to human objection. I certainly understand it, however. When and if the movement against Trump grows it will also mature and the level of random violence will subside. At present, protester violence should register as no more than as asterisk.

In the case of Los Angeles, I am hoping the Latino-heavy labor movement will forcefully intervene in the protests ASAP and demonstrate the sort of discipline and maturity its organizers and rank and file routinely display.

In the meantime, I am focussed not on some kid tossing a rock or even setting a cop car on fire. I am much more fixated on the violence both present and threatened by a rogue administration peopled by convicts, sociopaths, grifters and fascists. Save your moral outrage for them as they are the guilty parties here.

As the bible states in Hosea 8:7 of the King James Version:
”For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.” +++

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