Who's behind these car fires in LA? Mayor Karen Bass has good reason to suspect false flags.

One of the most lamentable aspects of the growing anti-ICE protest movement in Los Angeles has been the almost nightly occurrences of car fires—a destruction of private property totally unrelated to the issues of the protests. They tanish what have been largely peaceful protests with a tinge of violence. They make for very dramatic videos against the night sky. And they will be used by the Trump/Miller regime, and its tamed media, to indict the protest movement as a whole. Over at Fox News, they probably already have a reel playing on a loop.

1982 ACLU lawsuit against LAPD

The other thing about a car fire is that it only takes one person to start it—especially if planning and preparation is done before hand. So, could it just be some fire nut(s) making use of the chaos to do what they like to do? Or could it be something more sinister?

To address this question, we must ask: Who benefits? {Cui Bono?} Certainly not the peaceful protesters.

The one answer that must come to mind is: those who wish to discredit the protests. This most certainly could include police operatives working undercover and pretending to be protesters. The FBI has a long history of using such agents, and so does the LAPD. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass knows this well, and I know that she knows this because, more than 40 years ago, we were both named plaintiffs in the 1984 ACLU lawsuit against the LAPD for political spying.

This story began for me in 1981 when an ACLU lawyer explained to me that a comrade in the Southwest Community Justice Committee (SCJC) had been a police spy. This was a few years earlier when we were organizing against LAPD violence around the killing of Eula Love. The man I knew as Donald Rafiki, had been revealed to have been an undercover LAPD cop, whose real name was Donald Rochon. I remember Rafiki as one that was quick to propose seemingly more militant, but illegal actions. Now I learned that he was an LAPD spy from their infamous Public Disorder Intelligence Division [PDID]! At the time I was the Leader Organizer for SCJC. So, I became a named plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against the LAPD on Feb. 8, 1982.

As more and more LAPD spying was uncovered, this lawsuit was folded into a larger lawsuit that the ACLU filed on March 10, 1984 that brought the total plaintiff count to 144, one of which was our current mayor, Karen Bass. I knew of Karen Bass as a community organizer back in the day. I don't know what she did to put her on the wrong side of PDID, but there she was, listed alphabetically on the named plaintiff list, leading the Bs, so, ahead of the Black Panther Party, and head of me, Clay Claiborne in the Cs. We eventually won a $1.8 million settlement in which the LAPD agreed to change the name of the PDID to the ATD [Anti-Terrorist Division] and curtail some of its worst practises.

Which is to say, our mayor, Karen Bass, knows well, and personally, how police and government agents have played the role of provocateur in the past.

In a related note, I was happy to see Congresswoman Maxine Waters demanding entry to inspect the LA ICE jail on Sunday morning. Back in 1979, when SCJC was protesting the LAPD killing of Eula Love, Waters was just a state assemblyperson who championed the cause. Glad to see she's still going strong.

Clay Claiborne

10 June 2025