Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, discussing the unrest in Los Angeles with Newsmax on Wednesday, questioned President Donald Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops into California but agreed that Mayor Karen Bass must call on the resources available to her to deal with the situation.
“First and foremost, clearly, if there are troubles in your city, as the mayor, you must deal with those,” Brown told “Wake Up America.” “That means you must call upon whatever resources may be available to you and your city and your state and in your nation. I believe that the mayors of California are doing exactly that now.”
Brown, 91, is credited with helping launch California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political career and said that he believes having the National Guard “imposed” on the state leaders has made the situation “difficult.”
“They have imposed upon them a collection of people called National Guard personnel, and the express purpose, supposedly, is to help keep the peace when the peace is not disturbed beyond the perimeter of what you can do to protest,” said Brown. “It’s very difficult to present an image of you doing something if there’s really nothing to do.”
Meanwhile, he said he does not know what communications took place between Trump, Bass, and Newsom before the Guard was sent in.
“I know that in their cases, there probably are very few times that they could pick up the telephone and call the president, and those discussions would have to include that we need your assistance if that is the case,” Brown said.
He added that all cities in the United States have been addressing for years the problems dealing with protests and have police who are trained to handle such matters, starting back during the Civil Rights movement.
“I was a person, as you would call a National Guardsman,” said Brown. “I was never trained to do the business of handling protesters. That was always an instant process. That’s what has occurred in the state of California. For whatever reason, President Trump decided, without apparent consultation with anybody, to do that kind of job.”
The Guard, he added, “has arrived in Los Angeles with zero preparation. They didn’t know where they were to stay. They didn’t know what the food circumstances were.”
Brown also insisted that there was “no evidence of anything really horrible not under the control of the local police force. I’m sorry he didn’t canonize the local police force first before bringing in the people called.”
Brown did, however, disagree with the claims from Bass and Newsom that the anti-ICE protests were peaceful.
“The protests are never really peaceful under the kind of circumstances where cars and rocks and things of that nature are thrown,” said Brown. “But the police force of Los Angeles is as effective at doing their job as the police force of New York, as the police force of San Francisco.”
And before there is federal intervention with “inexperienced, untrained, unprepared personnel like the Willie Browns of the world from the 126 Medical Battalion, the cooperation between the two heads ought to reflect itself in the quality of how they handled it.”
That didn’t happen in Los Angeles, Brown said, “because the cops and the sheriffs were ordered to stand on the side. And believe me, under no circumstances did that make any sense. But it also translated into the world thinking bad things were happening in Los Angeles beyond control. That is not true.”
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