Blame Game/Shame Game

From the LA Times: UCLA Police Chief John Thomas, who was blasted for serious security lapses and failing to protect students during a melee at a pro-Palestinian encampment last spring, has left his job at the university, the campus police department said Wednesday night. In a post on the social media platform X, the UCLA Police Department said that Thomas’ last day with UCLA was Tuesday. UCLA Police Capt. Scott Scheffler will serve as interim police chief until a permanent chief is selected, the post said. The post did not elaborate on whether Thomas voluntarily resigned or was fired...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-12-11/ucla-police-chief-blasted-for-security-lapses-that-led-to-protest-violence-is-out. 

From the UCOP independent review of the UCLA policing issues of last spring:

...[The] expectation that UCLA PD remain less visible and engaged with the community was demonstrated in UCLA’s response to the encampment. Encampment members... made clear throughout the encampment period they did not want to engage with police or to see police in or around the encampment, and the UCLA administration was responsive to these requests.

Although there are some conflicting accounts about how this translated into direction to police – with the UCLA PD reporting that they were told to stay entirely off campus, while some administrators told us that the police were not told to stay off campus but rather were told to stay out of sight – there is general agreement across most accounts that police were instructed to remain wholly unseen by protesters. This played out during the encampment period in many ways and instances, such as when protesters objected to officers’ presence in a nearby building, where they had positioned themselves to gain information about the state of the encampment, administrators instructed officers to leave. UCLA PD therefore was handicapped in its ability to gain information about the encampment, its size, whether there were any weapons within the encampment, and whether protesters around the encampment were posing a growing danger to those within the encampment. When administrators instructed the police department to engage, the police lacked critical information that could have helped it determine the lowest level intervention necessary to accomplish its goals...

Full report at https://ia600402.us.archive.org/9/items/2-final-hjaa-report.-the-soil-beneath-the-encampments/LAPD%20report%20on%20UCLA%2011-5-2024.pdf.

To summarize, the UCLA police chief is told by unnamed "administrators" to have his officers stay away from the encampment because those in the encampment didn't want to see police. Then, when an incident occurred, the UCLA police weren't there to deal with it. So, the response to all of this is to fire the police chief. And the "administrators" presumably are untouched. 

Any questions?