Graffiti at night. Cleanup in the morning. The night-and-day difference of L.A. protests

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2 days ago

On Wednesday morning, the 18-year-old drove an hour from her home in Ontario to downtown Los Angeles to protest ongoing federal immigration raids and President Trump's deployment of the military to the city.
Gryphon Woodson, a new high school graduate, grabbed a pair of goggles and a black bandanna to cover her face. It was her first-ever protest. And after watching videos of chaos in the streets all week, she figured she would be joining throngs of passionate demonstrators.
But she arrived too early.
As she stood outside the graffiti-covered Federal Building on Los Angeles Street around 11 a.m., the downtown streets were clear. Clusters of police officers stood at ease around courthouses and City Hall, drinking coffee and Red Bull, chatting with dog walkers, scrolling on their phones.
"I thought there were gonna be more people here," Woodson said. "I thought people were going to be out, you know, during the day."
By 6:30 p.m., it was a different scene entirely. Los Angeles police officers on horseback charged toward hundreds of people who had marched from Pershing Square to the graffiti-marred City Hall, knocking some protesters to the ground as officers on foot fired rubber bullets into the crowd.
"It's very disruptive to day-to-day life — the raids, the protest. Everything is destroyed!" said Saul Barnes, a 22-year-old whose family owns a nearby hotel, as he jogged away from a police officer on horseback wielding a baton. "Who the hell wants to work in a state like this?"
Calm in the morning. Rowdy at night. That was the routine in downtown Los Angeles this week after Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deployed the National Guard and active-duty Marines to the city amid scattered protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
Both police and protesters have said the difference between night and day has been palpable in the city's already quiet downtown, which has struggled with historically high rates of office vacancy since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The intense but isolated chaos has mostly been in and around the Civic Center, which includes City Hall, the LAPD headquarters and multiple courthouses and federal buildings. The area is a few blocks within a city that's just over 500 square miles.
There, protesters have burned driverless Waymo vehicles, hurled rocks and bottles at police and National Guard members, and shut down the 101 Freeway. Businesses have been burglarized; windows, smashed. The phrases "F— ICE," "F— LAPD" and "F— Trump" have been spray-painted onto scores of buildings, including City Hall, a 1928 Art Deco landmark.
A city-ordered 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. downtown curfew that began Tuesday — along with many protesters' calls for nonviolence — appeared to quell some of the late-night violence and property damage.
Trump this week called the nation's second-largest city "a trash heap" that needed rescuing from so-called foreign invaders and rioters. He wrote on Truth Social that "if our troops didn't go into Los Angeles, it would be burning to the ground right now, just like so much of their housing burned to the ground" in the January fires that devastated Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
But if the president were to visit the city center during the day, he might be a little bored.
On Wednesday morning, a veteran LAPD officer sitting outside City Hall said the days have been mostly calm — and the protest schedule predictable.
The officer, who said he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the department, said crowds trickled in around 1 p.m. each day. If they were taking part in an organized protest — the Service Employees International Union rally that drew thousands to Gloria Molina Grand Park on Monday or a march led by faith leaders Tuesday — they were peaceful, if boisterous.
In the late afternoon and at night, he said, "the ones that are here to agitate" show up. Many are teenagers.
Sitting next to him, smoking a cigar, a 53-year-old LAPD officer described the late-night protesters as "the Mad Max crowd: people with mini bikes, people with masks, rocks, bottles, fireworks."
The officer, a Latino who was born at L.A. County-USC hospital and raised in East L.A., said with a sigh that he loved his home city, and "we have nothing to do with ICE; we have nothing to do with the raids, but we're here because of the disorder."
On Wednesday afternoon, Reginald Wheeler, a 62-year-old homeless services worker, said he had been attending protests all week after his work day ended around 3 p.m. and staying until things got rowdy. He referenced the 1984 hip-hop song "Freaks Come Out at Night" by Whodini and said "that's the vibe" when the sun goes down.
"The more peaceful protesters tend to leave," he said. "They've got dinner to cook."
Edward Maguire, a criminologist at Arizona State University, said that's "a common dynamic" during times of major protest, with "criminal offenders" taking advantage of the commotion — and, often, the nighttime darkness — to wreak havoc near the sites of more ideologically-motivated demonstrations.
The provocations in Los Angeles appear to have been made worse by the presence of uniformed soldiers, Maguire said, because "people have a strong drive to reject this idea of troops in the street, particularly in an instance like this where it's clearly not warranted."
Calvin Morrill, a professor of law and sociology at UC Berkeley, said most modern protests are nonviolent and highly organized by activists, labor unions and community organizations.
"Under normal circumstances in most democratic countries, when police perceive protests to be potentially more violent, more of a threat, they will escalate as well, and there's a dance between policing and protest," Morrill said. "But that's not what's happening in Los Angeles. ... This is a spectacle that is constructed by the federal administration to dramatize the threat, the fear, for people who aren't local Angelenos, who are very far from the actual place. It's dramatized for media consumption."
Although Trump has portrayed the entire city as a lawless place — where federal agents have been "attacked by an out of control mob of agitators, troublemakers, and/or insurrectionists," he wrote on Truth Social — the literal night-and-day differences have played out all week.
Early Monday evening, after a few hundred people ignored dispersal orders near the Federal Building, police — firing less-lethal munitions and tossing flash-bang grenades — pushed protesters into Little Tokyo, where businesses and the Japanese American National Museum were heavily vandalized.
Daylight Tuesday brought a starkly different scene: volunteers scrubbing graffiti from the exterior of the museum, which highlights the painful lessons of Japanese Americans' mass incarceration during World War II.
After seeing images of the vandalism on her social media feeds, Kimiko Carpenter, a West L.A. mom and hospice volunteer, stopped at Anawalt Lumber to buy $50 worth of rags, gloves, scraping brushes and canisters of graffiti remover. She drove downtown and rolled up her sleeves.
Wiping sweat off her brow with the elbow of her white button-down shirt, Carpenter said she had no official affiliation with the museum but was half Japanese and had volunteered there years ago as a teenager. Working to remove the spray paint scrawled across the windows felt like a tangible thing she could do for a few hours before she had to pick up her young children from school.
Shortly before the curfew went into effect Tuesday night, hundreds of people led by a coalition of faith leaders marched from Grand Park to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building on Los Angeles Street, stepping in front of another, more contentious protest group.
As the faith leaders arrived and asked their group to take a knee and pray on the building's steps, Department of Homeland Security officers trained pepper-ball guns on clergy members, and National Guard members tensed their riot shields.
'We see that you are putting on your masks; you don't need them,' Rev. Eddie Anderson, pastor of McCarty Memorial Christian Church and a leader with LA Voice, said to the officers and guardsmen. 'The people have gathered together to remind you there is a higher power. To remind you that in Los Angeles everybody is free, and no human is illegal.'
When the clock struck 8 p.m., the religious group left.
A few dozen people remained. Someone threw a glass bottle at officers from a nearby pedestrian bridge. Officers on horseback wove chaotically through traffic, knocking a protester to the ground. Within 30 minutes, the familiar sounds of LAPD less-lethal munition launchers and screaming demonstrators filled downtown again.
The next morning, Woodson showed up to the quiet Federal Building, where she and a handful of other young women were outnumbered by journalists.
"My plan today was to make as much noise as possible," she said. "Trump likes to try to suppress our voices. ICE wants to suppress our voices. LAPD wants to suppress our voices. I'll be damned — I refuse. As a Black person in the United States, I'm not gonna have my voice suppressed anymore.'
Around 11:20 a.m. Wednesday, five camouflaged National Guard members lined up on the building's front steps, standing behind clear riot shields. At the sight of them, Woodson tied her bandanna around her face and started marching back and forth, screaming: "Immigrants are not the problem! Immigrants are never the problem!"
Marching quietly behind her, a Mexican flag draped over her shoulders, was 19-year-old Michelle Hernandez, a daughter of Mexican immigrants who lives in East L.A. and had been worried about family members and friends during the ICE raids.
She spoke softly but said she wanted "to be a voice for those who cannot speak." She said it hurt to see Latino police officers and federal agents involved in the immigration crackdown and that it was "very heartbreaking seeing your own people betray you."
As the young women marched, several Latino maintenance workers snaked a power hose across the Federal Building steps, paying no mind to the heavily-armed National Guard soldiers as they sprayed away graffiti. One worker, a 67-year-old from East L.A., said he was glad to see the soldiers outside the building where he had been employed for the last 20 years because he figured the vandalism would have been worse without them.
George Dutton, a UCLA professor who teaches Southeast Asian history, stood by himself in front of the Federal Building steps, holding up a sign that read: "It's Called the Constitution You F—" as the young women walked back and forth behind him.
Dutton, who was taking a break from grading final exams, was not surprised at the quiet.
'It speaks to the various paradoxes around this — it's a movement that ebbs and flows,' he said.
'I see soldiers carrying guns and wearing fatigues, so maybe they're trying to create the idea that this is a war zone," he added. "And if you did a tight shot on one of these National Guardsmen, you might actually cast that impression. But if you pull back, you get the big picture and you realize that, no, it's literally manufactured.'
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.