UCLA has a total UCPD force of 65 officers. They are spread across three shifts daily and not all are in the field. I’m guessing they probably have ~35 active officers during business hours, ~15 active officers in the evening, and ~10 active officers for graveyard, with ~5 in administrative duties.

The point here is that at 11p on 4/30 the UCPD was outnumbered. Their 15 person team was in no position to take on a chaotic and violent crowd of 800 (500 pro-Pal and 300 counter protesters) in the dark of night. If this truly was a violent mob as reported, UCPD would need to call in outside agencies to amass an appropriate sized response team. Mind you - this is in context of people getting physical over Israel and Palestine so who knows how aggressive the passions might become or what weapons people may have and use. It is reasonable that not one UCPD should go in without backup lest they escalate the situation.

As for those outside agencies, they were not at heightened alert on 4/30. Their officers had no warning or expectation that they would be summoned individually from their homes late at night from across Los Angeles. This is because it is UC policy to not assemble police preemptively when it comes to protests. I have to assume this is something that UC protesters of yore argued for. Essentially this means that the 500 responding officers needed to be identified, summoned, confirmed, dressed, driven, and assembled at the Federal Building so that they then could then be briefed and organized en masse before packing into busses to be transported to UCLA where they would assemble and then walk across campus into position.

In a situation where no one was on call, mustering in just three hours actually sounds impressive to me. The way the critics would have it, this should have happened in 20 seconds time or, if not, it must be sabotage or conspiracy by UCLA, or Gene Block sending a message.

So tell me, how long do you think it should reasonably take to summon 500 off duty officers and deploy them on Dickson Plaza late at night?