After Maduro, Meet Public Enemy #2: Trump Targets Newsom and California’s Corruption Machine
President Donald J. Trump kicked off the new year by ordering a precision U.S. military operation that seized Public Enemy #1 Nicolás Maduro from his own capital in Caracas – an elite strike that handed the deposed dictator over to federal prosecutors in New York.
By Cece Woods
Sheriff Robert Luna’s recent self-congratulatory claim of “remarkable success” in public safety for 2025 borders on delusion.
While Luna celebrates manufactured victories and hollow narratives of accountability, the lived reality across Los Angeles County tells a far darker story, one marked by fatal explosions, systemic technological failures, mounting civil rights lawsuits, catastrophic wildfire response breakdowns, and a sheriff who repeatedly sacrifices his own deputies to appease political pressure.
The record is not ambiguous. It is damning.
On New Year’s Eve 2024, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department suffered a full collapse of its obsolete Computer-Aided Dispatch system, forcing deputies into manual, paper-based “blind dispatch” on one of the most dangerous nights of the year. Calls were logged by hand, communications reverted to radio traffic, and response coordination was left vulnerable when public safety mattered most.
One year later, nothing has changed.
On December 31, 2025, an internal LASD bulletin again ordered patrol stations into self-dispatch mode from 2300 to 0500 hours due to anticipated CAD failures during the year transition. Deputies were instructed to rely on voice broadcasting, handwritten logs, and the backup ALT-CAD platform, technology so outdated it should have been retired decades ago. The department did not suffer an unexpected glitch; it planned for failure because failure has become routine.
Sheriff Robert Luna publicly promised the CAD system would be replaced. A year later, an internal memo confirms the problem remains unresolved. This is not a knowledge gap. Luna inherited direct warnings from former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who repeatedly identified the 30-plus-year-old CAD system as the department’s single most critical public safety vulnerability. Villanueva spent four years pressing the Board of Supervisors to replace it. Those efforts were ignored.
Luna’s assurances have fared no better. As he enters his fourth year in office, the CAD system is nowhere near replacement, despite repeated failures and explicit advance notice of the risk. The message is unmistakable: the danger is known, the fix is available, and leadership has chosen delay over action, leaving deputies and the public exposed, year after year.
This is not progress. It is institutional negligence on repeat.
During the devastating January wildfires that scorched Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and other parts of Los Angeles County, Sheriff Robert Luna’s leadership was conspicuously absent at critical moments when decisive action mattered most. As the Palisades and Eaton fires became one of the deadliest and most destructive wildfire events in county history, internal sources and reporting found that LASD failed to adequately plan and deploy evacuation resources, leading to a staggering loss of life and leaving communities exposed even after days of advance warnings and field intelligence pointing to an imminent catastrophe.
In layman’s terms, Luna failed to prepare for what would arguably be the largest single disaster in the history of Los Angeles. While liability is being litigated across agencies and utilities, LASD’s ground-level failures under Luna’s command are undeniable.
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