I’ve been glued to social media watching the Los Angeles riots, sorry, peaceful protests. It’s like a train wreck you can see coming, but I cannot bring yourself to turn away from it. I heard that Stephen Miller is being blamed on the left for triggering (their word) the riots. He is the left’s favorite bogeyman, and they would like nothing better than to get rid of him. I wouldn’t put it past them to try to assassinate him.
I have to say I admire both Border Czar Tom Homan and presidential advisor Stephen Miller. They are showing a lot of guts in doing these deportations. Rather than backing down in certain jurisdictions, instead, they are going hard after sanctuary states. If the current poll numbers are anything, then they made the right choice. It was not the choice I would have made. Call me cowardly, but I sort of consider certain areas of the country lost and balkanization of the United States inevitable. However, Homan and Miller have the audacity to gamble big and not be afraid of a confrontation. I hope they are right.
If I were in charge, I would have tried a different strategy; one of going after soft targets first and working my way up to harder targets. One of the theories I remember from my graduate school years was hot spot policing. The idea being that you put your police officers where most crime was occurring. In Washington, D.C., that place used to be Union Station. More 911 emergency calls were coming from Union Station than anywhere else in the District of Columbia. A lot of homeless people would hang around there and there was a mix of commuters and tourists going in and out of the place. Instead of waiting for the next call to come in, they stationed officers there for their entire shift. This drastically reduced 911 calls from coming in.
There were different variants of hot spot policing. Sometimes, it seemed to work, and other times it didn’t. Sometimes, closing down a drug market by having police at one location just caused the drug dealers to find a new spot. There may have been a temporary decrease in crime until the addicts and the dealers found a new spot, but it kept coming back. Incidentally, the hot spots policing theory did not work with the border. When walls were constructed to keep illegal aliens from crossing in one area of the border, the aliens were moved to different areas of the border. In that way, it was more like a military operation.
When it came to entire cities, the logical thing to do was assign more police to high crime areas and fewer to low crime areas. This happened to some degree before, but they tried to increase police in poor non-white communities even more. One of the researchers broke a city up into three categories, high crime, low crime and somewhere in the middle. When they started targeting the “hot spot”, crime there decreased slightly but not much. Interestingly, crime in the middle range and low crime areas increased now that their were fewer police there. So, as with so many things in life, things weren’t as simple as what they were hoping.
Next, they tried a tactic of still keeping law enforcement in the high crime area, but not as much. They increased patrolling in the mid level crime area, and there, they were successful in driving crime rates down. (As I recall, the research did not focus on race. That was taboo).
So, then the new theory was to target areas where crime could be reduced by policing and to slowly encroach on the areas that are higher crime.
Off subject slightly, but this story will come back around. During one of my interview trainings, a State Police inspector told our class about how he sometimes handled suspects who were reluctant to come forward. Take as an example a young child goes missing. The police canvass the neighborhood and ask the neighbors who saw her last. One household refuses to talk to the police. OK, well, the police let the neighborhood know that everyone talked to the police, but what about that one guy who refused to cooperate? What do you know about him? The parents of the missing child are livid and suspicious of the reluctant neighbor. Often, it wasn’t long before that neighbor was calling the police complaining, “I can’t go to the supermarket without getting dirty looks. Some lady spit on my car, and my kids are getting taunted in school ‘Your daddy is a murderer’, please come interview me.” I suspect this tactic works well in homogeneous white neighborhoods, better than in black neighborhoods where “Snitches get stitches.”
There are areas of the country where immigration raids are happening without crowds of protesters turning out. Florida comes to mind. The alternative to Miller and Homan’s tactic would be to focus additional resources towards red states where the locals and the police are on the side of immigration enforcement. You want to be a sanctuary city? Fine, I’ll let all the illegals know. Crack down on the illegals all around the city, but not in the city. Make the illegal aliens flood the area. Sure, there will be some hardcore lefties who welcome the extra illegals, but not everyone will. As the number of illegals increases, more and more people will be coming around to the idea that immigration enforcement is not such a bad idea after all.
Anyway, that would have been my plan, but I think it’s too late now. The die is cast, they’ve crossed the Rubicon. I suppose they could retreat from L.A., but this will embolden the America haters into believing their tactics won.
When I was on the job, we did run into problems with one of these groups. I believe they called themselves Rapid Response Rochester, a group of traitors who help illegal aliens out. If you speak Spanish well enough, feel free to crank call them saying you are without papers and ICE is at your door. “Ayudame! Ayudame! La Migra esta acqui!” It looks like the far leftists have a Facebook page too.
I can remember one of these groups protesting outside the Buffalo Border Patrol station, and we heard from other Agents about them showing when arrests were happening to try to prevent our guys from arresting illegal aliens. A lot of illegal aliens started carrying their telephone number around. Once when we made some arrests in the early morning at a hotel. I had chased one of the illegals into a hotel and nabbed him as he got to the staircase. When I was running by the front desk after the alien, one of the hotel guests was strolling by. Apparently, he was part of this network and he tried taking video of us and posting it to the internet. (It didn’t work very well since the sun was barely coming up).
Several times when doing transportation checks on the local train, our Agents were videoed and had the videos uploaded to youtube. It did give an excuse of the slugs at our station to not do anything when it came time to. It is intimidation. Unfortunately for both the slugs and the immigration activists, we’ve got a new sheriff in town, and he’s putting pressure on Border Patrol and ICE to make arrests. GOOD!
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Why are the Democrats so prone to violence with their antifa shock troops, their BLM looters, and their blue haired weirdos? They are taking cues from the Nazis. Just like we took German rocket scientists over in Operation Paperclip, I’m convinced our intelligence agencies and marketing firms studied the Nazi propaganda techniques.
The above quote is why the Democrats believe they must stay in control of street protests. It’s why they were so harsh on the January 6 protestors who were protesting a fraudulent election. Can’t have Republicans feeling like they can safely protest! The same up in Canada where Justin Trudeau debanked peaceful protestors. They are convinced that in the realm of propaganda, this will be a winning formula for them. However, you can only lie so much before people start catching on that you are lying. Goebbels’ other technique of telling a lie often enough for it to become the truth is also at play. However, after all the lies (the border is secure, Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, this is the best Biden ever etc…) the all important moron vote is starting to catch on that maybe the Democrats aren’t telling them the truth.
These organic grassroots protests in L.A. seem to be being coordinated. A tiktoker calling himself @dracobig30 claims he was being paid $150 a day to protest. He goes on to explain how they were told where to go in the city, and how when they showed up, there would be stacks of bricks ready to go. These riots appear to be coordinated by groups like Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights (CHIRLA) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSLWEB). For CHIRLA, according to Data Republican, it got 34 million of its 45 million dollars from government grants.
“Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos” by Will Durant. We are seeing civilization fall apart in American cities with the increase in chaos from these protesters. Interestingly, even immigrants to the United States are starting to side with Trump on immigration. “Again, there is no bloc of voters that shifted more to the right from 2020 to 2024 than immigrant voters,” according to CNN Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten.
20 year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Author of "What Bridge Do You Work At? Or, Kids Are Cute; Therefore, Open Borders" & "East into the Sunset: Memories of patrolling in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century". Books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, as well as Thrift Books.
Master's Degree in Justice, Law and Society from American University.
Grew up partly in Europe.
