What If Los Angeles I.C.E. Skirmish Happened In Lubbock?

Though events are fluid, a situation happened this weekend where about 500 protesters tried to stop ICE agents in Los Angeles. As a result, the government activated 2000 National Guard troops. Having a grasp of numbers can significantly alter your perspective on a situation.

I want to downplay the politics of this L.A. incident, but instead help you understand how completely insignificant it was. It's hard to keep perspective when you see videos, 24/7 news coverage, and so on. So let's put it in Lubbock numbers that we can all understand.

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The crowd from this first incident seems to have started as a situation where a community took exception to ICE raids, then grew larger and larger. It didn't seem to be “organized resistance” or anything like that. It was mostly people milling around, with a few jackasses throwing stuff.

Now let's look at the reality of this situation. 500 people in Los Angeles or California is nothing. We're going to round up just a bit: California is about 40 million people, and Los Angeles County is about 10 million people. That’s still hard to get your head around, so I did the math with the actual population numbers.

500 people protesting in California means 0.001268% of the population was protesting. For the county, that's 0.0051%. This means, at least statistically, almost no one was protesting.

Here's What A Similar Protest Would Look Like In Lubbock.

Taking these figures here to our hometown of Lubbock, Texas, we can get an even clearer picture. If the same percentage of people in Lubbock protested, it would be a total of 3.35 people. That’s how insignificant all of this was.

Now for politics. To throw the National Guard at this situation is borderline insane, and pretty much like throwing gasoline on a fire (or on a teeny-tiny spark). This one incident—which has now grown because of federal intervention—wasn’t even worth talking about when it popped off.