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According to the OC Register, dealing with the summer riots in Anaheim cost $1.7 million in police overtime.

“The Police Department spent $1.7 million on officer overtime during a four-week stretch when people took to the streets to protest two fatal shootings by police and long-simmering political frustration over the summer.

The department deployed SWAT officers, mounted patrols, detectives and patrol officers amounting to nearly 24,500 hours of overtime in July and August. Based on those hours, the average hourly overtime wage was $69.”

This should surprise no one. Ensuring the safety of citizens is a fundamental duty of government.

This wasn’t the only cost to the city. This may be news to some, but riots are bad for business. They scare away tourists, conventions, as well as those thinking of buying a home or locating a business in Anaheim. Scenes of violent mobs threatening to storm City Hall and wandering the streets breaking windows, setting fires, throwing rocks and threatening bystanders do not say, “Anaheim is a wonderful place to live, work and play!”

What is sad are those, like Councilwoman Lorri Galloway and the coterie of activists who ceaselessly agitate for left-wing causes in Anaheim, who have pandered and inflamed the elements behind the riots. Lawlessness should be confronted and condemned, not placated and “understood.”

This news is a reminder that the Anaheim is under siege from a left-wing coalition that is hostile to free enterprise (witness the endless condemnations of”profiteering”) and expresses more sympathy with the lawless elements who torment the working poor than the police who combat those elements. This coalition is working, via protest, political action and litigation, to engineer a new political order in Anaheim that is fundamentally at odds with the great silent majority of Anaheim residents. They are aided by the somnolence and obliviousness of Orange County’s Republican and conservative leadership and activists, and the paid assistance of some.

The $1.7 million in riot-related costs will come out of the city’s budget. Replacing it is complicated by the noisy efforts of this left-wing coalition, which will necessarily impact city revenues by making Anaheim seem like a more dangerous and chaotic, and less business-friendly city.