The federal government just did what California refuses to do, and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli isn’t mincing words about why that happened. After leading Operation Save Skid Row on Thursday, a massive drug crackdown involving 28 arrest warrants and over 100 law enforcement vehicles, Essayli laid the blame exactly where it belongs. On California’s politicians.
“Unfortunately, states like California have totally watered down their laws, their criminal justice laws,” Essayli said. “They’ve also emptied their prisons and closed prisons, so effectively, there’s not much of a deterrence on the state side. No one faces any serious consequences on the state side.”
You know what’s fascinating here? It’s not the local cops who dropped the ball. Essayli made that crystal clear. State and local law enforcement want to work these cases. They want to clean up neighborhoods like Skid Row where drug dealers operate with impunity. The problem is the politicians, the governor, the legislature, the loud-mouth Congress members who care more about attacking the administration than fixing their own catastrophic failures.
California has become a laboratory experiment in what happens when ideology trumps common sense. They emptied prisons. They passed laws that essentially decriminalized theft and drug dealing. They created a system where criminals face zero consequences, and now they’re shocked (shocked!) that crime is out of control. The federal government stepping in to do basic law enforcement in one of America’s largest cities is embarrassing. It’s a damning indictment of progressive governance.
Operation Save Skid Row targeted members of multiple gangs, including the Main Street Crips, Grape Street slash Raymond Avenue Crips, and the Pueblo Bishop Bloods. These aren’t small-time operations. These are organized criminal enterprises that have thrived in the vacuum created by California’s refusal to enforce its own laws.
Essayli reserved particular contempt for those calling to defund or disarm the police. “This is a climate in which you have people right now trying to defund the police. You have people trying to disarm the LAPD, and those people are on the side of criminals,” he said. “Anyone who’s calling for disarming the police is on the side of the drug dealers that we arrested today. They’re lunatics.”
That’s the kind of blunt truth we need more of in public discourse. If you’re advocating for policies that make it impossible for law enforcement to do their jobs, you’re helping criminals. Period. There’s no intellectually honest way around that reality.
To her credit, Mayor Karen Bass approved LAPD participation in the operation. That’s something. But one day of federal intervention doesn’t fix the systemic rot that California politicians have created over years of disastrous policy choices.
The people suffering most from these failed policies aren’t wealthy progressives in gated communities. They’re the working-class residents forced to navigate streets controlled by drug dealers. They’re the small business owners watching their neighborhoods deteriorate. They’re the families who can’t let their kids play outside.
California chose this path. They embraced criminal justice reform that reformed nothing except the safety of law-abiding citizens. Now the rest of us get to watch the federal government do the basic work that state government abandoned. And when prosecutors like Essayli call out the lunacy, they’re just saying what everyone outside the progressive bubble already knows.
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