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Picture Los Angeles preparing for the Games. There are federal agents, National Guard soldiers, local police by the thousands, and more than a dozen bomb detection dogs helping “scores” of human bomb disposal experts. Picture two paramilitary hostage rescue teams with silencer-equipped machine guns, and “a task force of antiterrorist specialists” staffed by intelligence agents. Picture a city with multiple checkpoints for athletes, visitors, and locals alike, locked down so hard that a reporter from Kyodo News Service said it looks “almost like a military base.” You need a plastic card bearing your identity, information, and a magnetic strip to get into events and locations. In fact, security for the event is the “largest in peacetime,” including 100 helicopters that clog the city with omnipresent noise as they watch the whole town from the sky. Agents are watching from the ocean, too, some in a 399-foot icebreaker, others in smaller vessels, securing the port.
That was the scene in the summer of 1984. Under cover of providing Olympic security, the LAPD stockpiled their arsenal, using federal funds. Before and during the events, the LAPD and the FBI conducted “sweeps” to empty the streets of poor people of color so rich visitors wouldn’t see them, then continued doing so in the months that followed. In February 1985, an LAPD SWAT team “used a military-grade V-100 tank-like vehicle received from the Olympics and equipped with a 14-foot battering ram” to bust down a door of a suspected drug haven, only to find “two women and three children eating ice cream,” with no guns or drugs other than a small stash of weed. Forty-two years later, the LAPD continues to hoard war machines to use against Americans.
“So many people on Flower Drive remember the Olympics in the ’80s, their sons swept up in those mass arrests,” said David, an organizer with the Los Angeles Tenants Union who spoke on condition of using his first name only, referring to the homes directly across from Exposition Park and to the abuses that came during and after the 1984 Games, including the notorious Operation Hammer, a brutal 1988 raid on two apartment buildings seen as a precursor to the Rodney King beating and the 1992 riots.
Now picture all of that and add Trump’s obsession with spectacle, more high-tech weapons and surveillance, and federal agents bent on deporting people running the show. People on the ground will be unable to approach any venue by car and will endure surveillance checkpoints. That’s one thing for visitors and another for ordinary residents, “who are going to be subject to the multiple rounds of screening,” said Chris Tyler, communications manager of community group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. “There’s a kind of psychological infrastructure being developed where any and all mechanisms deemed necessary to the event will be justified and rationalized,” he added. LA28 has largely hidden the details about their plans from residents; as Tyler put it, “everything is really under tight lock and key.”
Civil rights advocates are warning of more CCTV in the city, drones overhead, and facial recognition everywhere. “We feel the Olympics is a Trojan horse that’s bringing more federal agents, more types of surveillance, and bringing more policing,” David said.
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