Photo by Aaron Giesel.

When the Eaton Fire first began its retreat from Altadena, I was in one of many self-organized mutual aid teams scattered across the area, cleaning up debris. Around this time, I connected with some Black community members who had just lost their homes. They had returned from evacuation almost immediately to help coordinate mutual aid for their neighbors. But they were harassed by the police as they tried to return to their homes. Hundreds of armed California National Guard, summoned by Los Angeles police and sheriffs, had effectively begun occupying parts of Altadena. The fires already disproportionately affected Western Altadena, the historically Black area of the city where most of the deaths have been located so far and where residents were given notices to evacuate hours after those in majority-white areas of Altadena were informed.1

The Los Angeles fires have become the most devastating in American history, causing widespread destruction in the Pacific Palisades and the San Gabriel Valley. The state seized the moment to portray itself as a savior in a time of great need. But its operations belie a different reality. Los Angeles has been under a budget crisis, fueled by a ballooning increase in the police budget at the expense of nearly all essential services, including the fire department. Mike Davis’s ever-timely essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” identifies Los Angeles’s long commitment to enabling the wealthy to redevelop in fire-hazard zones after each wildfire, often ignoring environmental restraints.2 This development has not translated into prosperity for the rest of the city. Working-class communities have been repeatedly decimated by fires because of negligent housing or working conditions beyond their control. Worse yet, each cycle of new development enables the next round of wildfires. Los Angeles’s ever-increasing police presence is not incidental to these patterns; it actively recommits us to the conditions that enable such disparities across repeating crises.

The dystopian roadblocks set up by the National Guard in Altadena stood in stark contrast to the Angelenos keeping the city alive with mutual aid. People have been housing and feeding one another. Some even assisted in putting out the fires, as the underfunded fire department had publicized a call for volunteer support. These Angelenos were essentially filling in the functions left empty by the state, whose clearest intervention during the crisis manifested in endless rows of military vehicles that divide Altadena, guarding nothing but ashes and sand along the western beaches.

What’s more, mass mutual aid has provided an invaluable opportunity for Angelenos to raise their political consciousness, integrating longstanding and emerging movement demands. Tenant organizers almost immediately demanded a rent freeze and eviction moratorium as the fires started. Abolitionists rallied the community to push for the evacuation of incarcerated youth ignored by the state in evacuation areas. Just as natural disasters and the city’s incapacity to protect its community, the eruption of city-wide mutual aid did not emerge spontaneously. The reconstituting militancy of the late 2010s and early 2020s Los Angeles left—pandemic protection, defense for unhoused communities facing police sweeps, immigrant defense rapid response efforts, the movement for Black lives, and the solidarity movement with Palestine—repeatedly allowed the people to exercise its instinct for community safety and political mobilization.

But this growth is far from steady. We must continue to strengthen and cohere these movements toward a greater level of political consciousness and organization. More specifically, movements must build on the momentum generated in recent years, including the mass mutual aid efforts during these fires. This momentum could be channeled toward a coalition around a program of demands that would center on public ownership and control over essential resources to ensure postdisaster reconstruction benefits working-class and marginalized communities. The resources for this reconstruction program must center on the expropriation of police resources as a common denominator among movements—in other words, an abolitionist city budget, building on earlier efforts by the movement for Black Lives.

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Before the fires, Los Angeles was already facing a budget crisis. City revenues had flatlined. Homelessness has reached unprecedented heights, despite countless new corporate developments promised to restore jobs, housing, and the local economy more broadly. At the center of the problem is the slashing of social services to account for the budget deficit just as police spending continues to skyrocket. The political alliance between real estate interests and the police is unambiguous. Last year a wide array of Los Angeles developers poured in vast resources to ensure “tough-on-crime” advocate Nathan Hochman’s victory over George Gascon in the election for district attorney, making Hochman’s campaign the most expensive bid for that office in Los Angeles’s history.3

The state’s failures as the fires erupted blatantly show the consequences of these imbalances. The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) faced the second-largest cut of all city departments in Bass’s 2024–5 fiscal budget—nearly $17.8 million—just as the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was granted a nearly $140 million increase. The LAFD chief spoke to CNN about the pitfalls of this budget as the fires were still being contained, testifying that last year’s budget cut “has and will severely impact our ability to repair apparatus.”4 Dozens of fire trucks still sit idly in the city’s repair lots, waiting for necessary maintenance that LAFD requested in last year’s city budget.5

This hollowing of essential firefighting services has increased the city’s reliance on superexploitative prison labor. In certain years, incarcerated firefighters make up nearly a third of the city’s wildfire defense. Months before the fires, public officials admitted that the reduction in using prison labor for firefighting services in recent years (due to efforts from prisoners’ rights advocates) would lead to critical shortages in the state’s capacity for wildfire control.6 Nearly a thousand incarcerated firefighters were employed at the height of the fires this year. Many were not given regular meals, were unable to shower for days on end, and worked for days without sleep. When the Pacific Palisades fire approached a mile of Barry J. Juvenile Hall, the facility refused to release the dozens of incarcerated youth held there despite Mayor Karen Bass’s mandatory evacuation notice in the surrounding area.7

As firefighters were stretched to their limits, the city decided to deploy even more police, calling in thousands of California National Guard officers to occupy parts of Altadena. At the apex of the Palisades and Eaton fires, mutual aid organizers and independent journalists documented police sweeps........

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