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Marvel movie star slams Democrat-run LA for crime explosion after his trainer is shot dead

August 19, 2022 | | Print Article

Hollywood actor Frank Grillo, known for playing the character Brock Rumlow in several Marvel films, just got a loud wake-up call about the reality of Democrat policies.

Last Friday, his now-deceased boxing trainer, Azuma Bennett, was shot eight times outside a marijuana dispensary in the Windsor Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.

As of a week later, local detectives had yet to discern a motive for the shooting or identify any potential suspects.

“One of Bennett’s friends, Aubrey, said you can still see blood in the doorway where the 30-year-old was killed,” Nine News, an Australian news service, reported Wednesday.

Bennett was originally from Australia.

“The former Waverley College student had moved to the US several years ago and was only a few weeks away from returning back to Australia,” according to Nine News.

His death left Grillo shocked.

“He made everybody feel good about training. I don’t know what’s happened to Los Angeles that a beautiful guy like this gets shot and killed over nothing,” the actor said to local station KNBC.

Listen:

What happened to Los Angeles and other cities like San Francisco, Cleveland, and Portland is quite clear: It turned into a left-wing “utopia” where the good guys suffer and the bad guys thrive.

“In the first half of the year, homicides recorded by the Los Angeles Police Department hit the highest level in over a decade,” according to local station KABC.

Sgt. Jerretta Sandoz of the Los Angeles Police Protective League told the station, “181 murder victims. We’re on pace for a 15 year high. This is very, very scary for our city and it’s scary for the residents that we are supposed to protect.”

This outcome is the result of several factors, starting first and foremost with the push to “defund the police.”

“From Philadelphia to Portland to Los Angeles, killings and gun violence are rising at the same time officers worn out by the pandemic and disillusioned over the calls to divest from policing that followed George Floyd’s murder are quitting or retiring faster than they can be replaced,” the Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month.

“Departments are scrambling to recruit in a tight labor market and also rethinking what services they can provide and what role police should play in their communities. Many have shifted veteran officers to patrol, breaking up specialized teams built over decades in order to keep up with 911 calls.”

Another factor is Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, a radical far-leftist who believes in bending over backward to cater to the criminal community.

He’s the mastermind behind Prop 47, a widely panned measure that downgraded a spate of felonies into petty misdemeanors. He eliminated cash bail for most offenses, meaning automatic release for criminals. He stopped charging juvenile offenders as adults, regardless of the seriousness of their offenses. And he started releasing hardcore criminals out of prison.

Take Andrew Cachu, a 25-year-old convicted murderer — yes, MURDERER — who was effectively freed last year by Gascón’s office after serving only six years of a 50-year sentence. Not surprisingly, he’s back in custody after committing another crime.

He was arrested in July “allegedly with a gun and drugs, after leading sheriff’s deputies on a three-mile car chase,” according to the Los Angeles Daily News.

“Andrew Cachu, 25, of Palmdale faces one felony count each of fleeing a pursuing peace officer’s motor vehicle and driving against traffic, possession of a firearm by a felon, and possession of a controlled substance with a firearm as well as two counts of possession for sale of a controlled substance, methamphetamine and cocaine,” the outlet reported at the time.

Combined, these factors have transformed Los Angeles into a place where it often costs nothing to be a criminal. Though in fairness, LA isn’t alone.

A recent study by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California Berkeley found that the downtowns of numerous left-wing metropolitan cities — San Francisco, Cleveland, Portland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc. — have recovered very poorly amid the decline of the COVID pandemic, likely because of the crime waves.

Whereas Salt Lake City earned a recovery value score of 155 percent, Los Angeles earned a paltry score of only 61 percent. Chicago, Detroit, Portland, Cleveland, and San Francisco fared even worse.

A large part of the problem is that the citizens of these cities don’t seem to care. For instance, a recent effort to recall Gascón fell by the wayside because organizers of the recall were unable to collect enough signatures.

Writing for Fox News, local attorney Jim Breslo attributed it to local residents’ notorious apathy.

“Angelenos are notoriously apathetic. They demonstrated it again with the news that organizers were unable to collect enough signatures to place the recall of District Attorney George Gascon on the ballot in November. This despite him being incredibly unpopular: a recent poll showed he would lose a recall vote in a landslide,” he wrote.

“This is the second time that organizers failed to get enough signatures. After failing the first time, it was expected they would certainly manage to get enough the second time. For months now it has been assumed that the recall of Gascon would be on the November ballot. The crime problem has only gotten worse.”

Vivek Saxena
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