Recent images of unrest in Los Angeles are making rounds across the world, prompting former National Guard member to downplay its scale by drawing parallels between protestors’ crowd sizes and those attending World Series celebrations in LA.
“To be fair, the crowd wasn’t nearly as large as what we saw when the Dodgers won the World Series,” stated Michael Ramirez, a retired National Guard sergeant who has served during past emergencies in California. People think Los Angeles is on fire, but they forget its enormity – hence its turnout being intense emotionally rather than numerically.
Ramirez’s remarks came amid increasing national media coverage of Los Angeles protests and unrest following an infamous police incident in South Central LA. Though violence and looting have occurred in certain areas, many observers, including former security personnel suggest the situation has been over-saturated with attention-seeking claims of widespread looting and violence.
“Protests are real and tensions exist,” Ramirez noted, but on a larger scale “we’ve witnessed larger, louder, and more enthusiastic crowds when either Lakers or Dodgers win championships.”
City officials have confirmed that while tensions remain tense, they are generally contained to a few neighborhoods. According to LAPD estimates, Monday night saw approximately 8,000 demonstrators citywide — an impressive turnout, but far less than when hundreds of thousands took to the streets after Dodgers won historic World Series game 2020.
Still, the federal government has taken an extremely careful approach. President Trump approved an additional deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles on Monday in an effort to help local efforts mitigate further unrest.
Residents and civil rights leaders alike have voiced concern over the militarized response, citing how it could escalate tensions while sending the wrong message about how civic dissent should be dealt with.
“It is essential to keep in mind that many protests in Los Angeles are peaceful protests,” according to Angela Kim, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney. “Any narrative which paints all of LA as violent or out of control is misleading and potentially harmful.”
Though there have been reports of looting in Melrose Avenue and parts of Downtown LA, community leaders have organized cleanup efforts and peace vigils in an attempt to bring calm back into these neighborhoods.
Social media users have shared Ramirez’s sentiment, with numerous viral posts comparing aerial shots from recent protests with those taken during previous sports celebrations – when streets were jam-packed to their capacity.
“This is not meant to minimize protests,” Ramirez clarified, but rather put things into perspective: LA is an expansive and dynamic city; not every large gathering means chaos.”
As Los Angeles enters its fifth day of protests, efforts continue to shift toward peaceful dialogue, justice reform, and efforts to avoid further confrontation. Officials remain vigilant but voices like Ramirez’s serve to remind the public to view events objectively and with an informed perspective.