Some grim news comes to us out of Los Angeles County this morning, though we probably shouldn’t be all that surprised. Two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were shot multiple times inside their patrol car last night in what’s being described as a completely unprovoked, ambush-style attack. Both were taken into surgery at a local hospital and are thankfully expected to survive. Making the incident even more offensive is that the entire thing was caught on a local security camera and it took place only a couple of blocks from the local sheriff’s station. And the Sheriff has a pretty good idea as to what prompted the ambush. (WaPo)

Two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were shot multiple times Saturday, apparently in an ambush without provocation, while sitting in their patrol car at a Metro rail station.

Sheriff Alex Villanueva said in a late-night news conference that the 31-year-old female deputy and 24-year-old male deputy both underwent surgery Saturday evening. Both graduated from the academy 14 months ago, he said.

The wounded deputies were able to radio for help, he said. Villanueva, whose department has come under fire during recent protests over racial unrest, expressed frustration over anti-police sentiment as he urged people to pray for the officers.

This attack took place in Compton. Yes, that’s the same community featured in the movie Straight Outta Compton and the NWA rap song of the same name. Compton has one of the highest per capita crime rates of any community of any size in the nation and is infamous for its rampant gang activity.

But that doesn’t mean that this was simply some random incident of gang activity. It’s certainly not unusual for gang members or other criminals to get into a shootout with the police in an effort to avoid arrest, but this was something entirely different. The attacker walked up to the deputies’ patrol car completely unprovoked and just opened fire on them through the open window of the vehicle. This was nothing short of an attempted assassination of two law enforcement officers.

Sheriff Alex Villanueva said, “It pisses me off. It dismays me at the same time.”

The Sheriff is expressing “frustration” over rampant anti-police sentiment throughout the city and in other cities across the nation. It’s true that much of the anger may be coming from people either protesting incidents of lethal use-of-force by the police or taking advantage of the protests to riot and create mayhem. But the unrest is being stoked by politicians and activists who are all too willing to blame the police for everything and demand “reforms” to a system of law enforcement few of them seem to understand.

If you go around constantly raising doubts about the integrity of the police and fomenting anger against them, how long was it going to be until someone did something like this? Particularly if that person is from a neighborhood that generally doesn’t have much trust in law enforcement to begin with, perhaps it was almost inevitable.

This incident is eerily similar to the ambush murders of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City in 2014. An investigation revealed that Brinsley was supposedly acting in revenge for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown while protests of those two incidents were roiling cities around the nation.

We’ve been hearing too many rallying cries of “F*** The Police” during the recent riots, sounding much more like a call to war than a protest. Apparently there have been people listening and taking that message to heart.