Los Angeles not ready for prime time during 2028 Summer Olympics – Orange County Register

The signature sound of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles was not the roar of the crowds packing the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, but the roar of helicopter blades circling above the City of Angels.

Hundreds of eyes in the sky were tasked with keeping criminals out of sight, whether in jail or at home. Even the National Guard was sent in to help keep watch and keep Los Angeles’ criminal life out of the international spotlight.

Olympic organizer Peter Ueberroth appeared on the cover of Time magazine as Man of the Year and later became the commissioner of Major League Baseball. Then-Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and LAPD Chief Daryl Gates emerged as Olympic heroes about to take the medal stand. Los Angeles raked in more than $200 million in profits. More than 70,000 jobs had been created, and then, almost as soon as the Olympic flame at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was extinguished, they were gone.

It was just the first floor of a house of cards that would go up in flames when the Rodney King verdict lit the fuse of years of frustration, unemployment and heavy-handed police action. That cannot happen again.

In four short years, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will welcome the world to Los Angeles once again as the host of the 2028 Summer Olympics. But Los Angeles isn’t ready for the big moment, because Mayor Bass and the Los Angeles City Council have no idea how to keep the city safe.

And a few international trips to Paris aren’t going to change that, because Mayor Bass and the City Council refuse to listen to the leaders of the Los Angeles Police Department, which was once one of America’s premier law enforcement agencies, but rank-and-file staffing has been reduced to just 8,802 officers because qualified candidates refuse to work in a hostile environment.

Los Angeles Olympic planners are hoping to shift $2 billion in security spending to the federal government to ensure the safety of Olympic athletes and tourists during the 2028 games. But that’s not enough.

Crime on METRO transit in Los Angeles is up 65% in the first few months of 2024. Riders were stabbed and shot to death almost as regularly as they were at scheduled METRO bus and train stops. Drivers were assaulted. And riders who stuck around because many of them have no other transportation options armed themselves, preparing for what seems inevitable.

Bass insists that the METRO system will transport fans to stadiums across Southern California, because the 2028 Olympics will be car-free. The California National Guard is too busy policing Oakland in a desperate attempt by California Gov. Gavin Newsom to maintain law and order in a city that has been decimated by soft-on-crime policies to help rescue Los Angeles from the consequences of its own actions.

Angelenos, and by extension the rest of Southern California, have been subjected to robberies, home invasions and widespread lawlessness as the city’s tough-on-crime strategy during the 1984 Olympics has morphed over the past 40 years into a lack of accountability and an elected district attorney, George Gascon, who refuses to enforce the law against those who break it.

Of all California regions, Los Angeles residents are the most likely to be very concerned about being a victim of crime, while residents of the Orange County/San Diego region are the least likely to be concerned, according to a February 2024 study by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Los Angeles is one of the major cities struggling to recruit and hire new officers as staffing levels hit their lowest level in more than two decades. LAPD Interim Police Chief Dominic Choi reported that while emergency calls, such as crimes in progress, have not been affected, response times to non-emergency cases have increased — for now.

As cities across California, including San Francisco under the leadership of progressive Mayor London Breed, are taking steps to evict homeless encampments as a result of the Supreme Court’s Grant’s Pass decision coupled with Governor Newsom’s executive order to give cities the power to manage their own encampments, Mayor Bass has doubled down on her refusal to address the homeless encampments that have plagued her city and resulted in catastrophic fires that resulted in the serious injury of a Los Angeles firefighter and the paralysis of one of the most congested freeways in the United States. Meanwhile, homeless encampments in Los Angeles continue to flourish while its vibrant neighborhoods continue to suffer at the hands of criminals.

Mayor Karen Bass should be worried about making Los Angeles safe for the Olympics. But more importantly, she should start worrying about making it safe for the millions of hard-working people who live there and will continue to live there when the international spotlight on the Olympics fades. And right now, not even the Olympic rings are safe from being stolen by criminals in Los Angeles.

Todd Spitzer is the Orange County District Attorney.

Originally published: August 12, 2024 at 5:48 am