This should come as a surprise to no one:
The Los Angeles Police Department mishandled the unrest that erupted on L.A. streets after the death of George Floyd, a result of poor planning, inadequate training and a disregard for rules on mass arrests and crowd control that were established after past failures to manage protests, according to a new report commissioned by the City Council.
“It is unfortunate that the same issues have arisen again and again, with the department being unable or unwilling to rectify the problem,” the report, prepared by a team of former LAPD commanders, stated.
Obviously I'm no expert on police management of protesters, but I think Rule #1 is: If they want to march, let 'em march. Sure, it will tie up traffic, but that's a price worth paying. The main goal of the police should be to protect the protesters and manage the protest route, while deploying most of their force elsewhere to handle opportunistic looters.
I can't say this for sure about other cities, but I watched plenty of coverage of Los Angeles and there was no question that the protesters were basically peaceful and could have been handled pretty easily if they'd just been shown a little bit of respect. Instead they got curfews and riot cops and road closures. So stupid.
I think you're missing an important distinction. If citizens want to storm the Capitol and murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House a light hand and gentle manner might be appropriate, but those people in L.A. were criticizing the police! That calls for tear gas, attack dogs, and armored personnel carriers! The NYPD also went out of their way to be as brutal as possible when confronted by a peaceful BLM protest. "Contempt of Cop" is still the worst crime possible
We cannot risk a repeat of the Zoot Suit Riots.
+1
It used to be that cops were poorly paid, but in compensation got to throw their weight around and occassionally kick butt. Things haven't really changed, except now thanks to right wing militant police unions they are highly paid.
The idea, I think, was for a well paid, professional, well trained and college educated police force. I believe the thinking was that such a force would act less brutally. But what happened was that the culture, along with militarization, absorbed the new officers and they became a well educated right wing goon squad.
But I have to think that it must have been a shock to see cops beaten with “Thin Blue Line” flags. Maybe a few had their eyes opened that the virtue signaling flag carriers will turn on them in a minute if they enforce the law equally.
"Siri, play Cop Shoot Cop..."
I know one of these right wing cops. He hated the protesters for the usual racist reasons, although he had a point when he complained that none of the looters would be prosecuted, so why bother stopping them? However, what he mainly saw in the marshalling of the police to monitor the protests was a way to collect a lot of easy overtime pay.
Oh please, nobody knew they would 'storm the capital'. That came out of the blue to just about everybody. They had 5 die in the attempt. I would have killed more. Yet, keep the ad hoc lines on coming.
We knew something big was being attempted beforehand. The mayor of DC pleaded with the public to avoid downtown DC on the 6th to avoid clashes with the Trumpies as there had been trouble the weekend Trumpies protested in Washington and vandalized a couple of historically black churches.
There’s actually a substantial body of evidence to show that Trump knew the capital would be attacked and seemed quite pleased during the attack.
https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/536612-did-trump-know-what-was-about-to-happen-jan-6
Since the LAPD did not follow protocol, they mishandled the situation. That is clear. Protocol exists for a reason. What was not clear from the post is what negative consequences that Kevin is attributing to the LAPD's action?
Is he saying that the excessive measured caused pain and restricted freedom in ways they should not have?
Or is he saying something further-- that by trying to preemptively prevent riots, the LAPD wound up causing or exacerbating riots in Los Angeles?
The first claim is indisputable. The second claim is questionable and would require further argument.
@blumpkin1
He was saying the cops screwed up AGAIN in the same way they have screwed up in the past, despite admonishments and retraining.
Kevin Drum didn't write the article he is citing; it was written by Kevin Rector and Emily Alpert Reyes of the LA Times. The LA Times article is in turn discussing a study conducted on behalf of the LA City Council. So the question is not what Kevin Drum is saying, it's what the LA City Council is saying.
@J.F. Parnell
Can't read the article. LA times paywall.
If you go to reader view you can read the article. It works at The Atlantic too.
@iamr4man
Reader view?
In Safari on Apple devices there are two letter “A”s in the address bar. If you click on that it will bring up a window with one option being “reader view”. For some reason this defeats the pay wall on some, but not all, web sites. I don’t know how to get to that outside of Safari but I assume other browsers have the same thing.
@iamr4man
Thanks! I'm PC only, so I don't use Safari (I know I could, but I don't) but I'll see if there is any equivalent mode in Firefox or Chrome.
The point is that it was a police riot designed to enforce a specific set of political beliefs and to remind white middle class people that they are going to be treated better than minorities only so long as they submit to conservatives.
From the LAPD’s perspective, they did do anything wrong. They remind the slobs who think they’re sacrosanct they the are feee from beatings, gassing, and summary execution only on sufferance.
I live a few blocks from where the confrontation between BLM and the LAPD happened and I can tell you with absolute certitude that the LAPD tactics left businesses (and a big and prominent shopping mall - The Grove) undefended and thus open to looters as the LAPD attacked peaceful BLM protesters. If I were a small business owner on Melrose Ave I'd be suing the LAPD for $10 million for gross incompetence.
Just to be clear: neither the LAPD nor any of the other police forces involved were acting to preempt or prevent riots. They were acting to express their dominance and flaunt their impunity. And to remind middle class white people that the only reason they are treated better and less brutally than minorities is because the police have chosen to restrain themselves.
The police today are a semi-benevolent army of occupation and are (along with their paramilitary counterparts) the armed wing of the Republican Party. We need to crush the police unions and reform the departments into effective law enforcement organizations.
One thing that was clear, across the country, was that if these were just generic political protests, the police might have been a bit more professional about them. But because the protests were protesting the police themselves, they saw it as "us vs them" and in many cases used their authority to use force to just...work out their aggression on peaceful protestors and try to silence them.
I think there need to be much stricter rules in place not just about how police handle protests, but how police specifically respond to protests of the police. In those cases, I think they have to be held to an even higher standard, because the risk of abusing their authority becomes even greater.
@royko
It's simpler than that: The police went crazy because it was"those people" protesting.
Nope, considering many of the Cops now in LA "are those people". Post smarter.
Heh. Shootie tried to make a funny.
@Midgard
Apparently you don't know how it works inside a big city police department. And since you popped up here it has been apparent that you don't actually know much about anything else. Post less.
But at least in the NOPD and LAPD (the only two departments I am really familiar with), "those people" have uniformly adapted to the police culture or been ostracized and forced out. That's particularly true with regard to the LAPD which has always been highly militarized and seen itself as the arbiter of what's politically acceptable.
In a lot of ways, the LAPD is largely unchanged from when I was a boy. I grew up in Chief Parker's era—less corrupt but smugger, holier than thou, and essentially an army of occupation more focused on keeping order and enforcing a unbending conservative political orthodoxy. Over the decades, very little had changed for the better and, in terms of outright corruption, there's been significant backtracking to the time before Chief Parker cleaned up the department.
There isn't really any point in having stricter rules if they aren't going to be enforced. That was one of the crucial points that the police were making all across the country. There have been no consequences for any of the police because they enjoy complete impunity, even in supposedly "blue" cities like NY, LA, Santa Monica, Philadelphia, etc.
If we can't hold any police accountable, there's very little point in having rules which we and they both know are just window dressing. Here in LA we should've abrogated the police union contract and called in the national guard to replace the patrol division while we weeded out the bad apples and enforced some discipline.
LAPD have a reputation of being arbiters of what is legal:
“ For a few months in 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department launched a foreign excursion of sorts -- a “Bum Blockade” on the state’s borders. The LAPD deployed 136 officers to 16 major points of entry on the Arizona, Nevada and Oregon lines, with orders to turn back migrants with “no visible means of support.”
The man responsible, Police Chief James Edgar “Two-Gun” Davis, was a former cotton-picker from Texas who came to California in 1911, dirt poor and uneducated. Davis, whose moniker referred to his extraordinary marksmanship with a pistol, liked to say that constitutional rights were of “no benefit to anybody but crooks and criminals.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-09-me-then9-story.html
It’s always been corrupt and brutal. Chief Parker cleaned up a lot of the widespread corruption and general confined the militarized army of occupation stuff to the minority areas but the overall attitude of the LAPD has never really changed. Sometimes there’d be a better chief but the department itself never changed and the chiefs who wanted change never really were able to do much.
Over the years, the corruption has returned and the brutality has escalated, particularly on political issues like immigration or police brutality. And we now seen how vulnerable civil society is to a right wing militarized police force which has complete impunity. Now that white middle class people have experienced the LAPD close up, maybe they’re ready to genuinely reform the department.
If you were in an ambulance trying to get to the hospital, you might not be quite so blase about protesters closing roads.
@ey81
Good point. There should always be a path left for emergency medical vehicles. Should be doable, without anyone getting beat up.
It is amazing how protests and riots completely surround hospitals all the time.
/s
In LA, on Sept 13, "protestors" gathered around a hospital, preventing an ambulance from entering. The ambulance carried two Sheriffs shot in Compton. The "protestors" chanted "we hope they die."
It is true that it happens.
No, it was even dumber than that. The deputies were already in the hospital being treated. Several protesters briefly blocked the driveway to the emergency entrance, but neither of the reports I read reported that any emergency vehicle was hindered from entering. Police were on the scene; one of the arrests was a journalist who was roughed up.
Didn't protesters around the Michigan capital last year block ambulances? Of course, those were gun-toting anti-mask protesters, so no one on the right complained.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you were lying on the pavement getting your brains beat in by unaccountable cops, you might not be quite so blase about police brutality.
Or if you were an elderly person shoved to the concrete in such a manner that it fractured your skull...
Yes - the roads are for transportation, not protests.
If you were a driver in a RED state you need not worry
Many are passing laws to protect drivers who hit protesters if they feel threatened.
":your Honor I was A-skeered of those black fellahs - HONEST !!! Sure I had loaded weapons on me but I was terrified of terrorists so I hit the gas by mistake"
Thats the republican version of "road clearing"
“while deploying most of their force elsewhere to handle opportunistic looters.”
In almost every big city, the impression I got was the police really didn’t try to limit looting. In fact, it sure seemed like the police liked (or even loved) the looting because it discredited the people demanding police accountability. I could swear I saw over and over again, hundreds of officers surrounding peaceful demonstrators with looting 5 blocks away.
Actually, the police response last year that pissed me off the most was police driving around shooting non-lethal rounds at people from their vehicles. I could have sworn the film I saw of that was in LA. Did this report mention that?
You might be confusing Portland with LA.
I can’t find any google hits for Portland police firing rubber bullets or other non-lethal rounds from moving vehicles. But I can’t find anything for LA either. It was early on, maybe in the first few weeks of protests and more than one person posted video on twitter of people hiding behind cover as police vehicles drove by firing projectiles. Maybe I just need to hit the correct search words to get google to cough up the films. Maybe I’ll never see the video again unless I read 10 books on the riots.
To me, this was much more surprising than that some police acted badly. It struck me as something you’d be more likely to see during the Tulsa riots of 1921 than a BLM protest in 2020. Wish I could find one of the videos.
It wasn't Portland Police, it was the Federal Alphabet Soup Agents that were doing the rogue shooting. They even rented minivans and snatched a few persons off the street.
I suggest looking up the journalist Robert Evans, he's done some serious work on reporting in Portland, not only interviews and fact finding, but taking wounds as well. And besides that, he's highly entertaining to listen to.
I am aware of the Portland grabbing of people into vans. That isn't what I'm referring to.
Journalist? Better! A chronicler of the human condition not seen since Chinatown.
Forget about, Jake.
No, both the LAPD and SMPD make it a point to drive past obviously very professional well organized looters. The cops were sending us a message. If the bluest city in America can put this guys back on the ears, we are screwed.
Please can we have editing!
I was trying to say that if blue cities like LA and Santa Monica can not control the police, we screwed.
I had to reread it many times, but I eventually deciphered your original post.
Stop right where you are! You know the score, pal. You're not cop, you're little people!
~ Bryant
Like anybody cares about those protests. Whining "blacks" who ignoring just about every other race in America gives people the "tune out" button. Considering the long improvement in black to cop ratio homicides since 1995, they are barking up the wrong tree. Even the prime age population numbers of unarmed black to cop death is 25%, which is the same number as total black prime age %%%. I think they want the attention and get high off of it, not unsimilar to "Republican white working class" voters. Woe is me, woe is me. I oppressed(and I say, you vote zionism and free market globalist into power, what do you think would happen????)
This is where social nationalism transcends the irrelevant "reform liberal" movement. Sorry, but there are injustices every where and in every "tribe".
Put down the crack pipe, use spell check, and get back to us, okay?
Heh. Shootie tried to make a funny.
I live near MacArthur Park in LA and was present for the MacArthur Park "Police Riot" in 2007, when cops went wild at a peaceful May Day rally. The actions the police took that days were really scary, and one of the stupidest things they did was attack news cameramen covering the event. That made for seriously bad visuals. However, unlike past instances of police misconduct, then Police Chief Bratton came down hard on his own department, and restaged the rally at a later date under his personal supervision, where the cops were so polite they practically handed out hot towels to the protesters. The result was that an ugly incident that could have lingered in everybody's memory was basically forgotten (save for the 13 million dollar settlement the city had to pay out later).
Contrast that to the actions of cops following the George Floyd protests. What I remember most vividly are images of cops slashing tires of parked vehicles at the protests. After that, I had no sympathy for them. Whereas if they had been contrite, and admitted that some officers had gone overboard in the killing of George Floyd, and engaged in a little soul searching, I could have forgiven them. They don't realize that the way to diffuse a situation like that is to admit they made a mistake, and let the bad actors suffer the kind of consequences they routinely dish out to the rest of us.
I think the choice the police made everywhere, including Los Angeles, was quite deliberate. One thing that's become quite clear is that the real bosses of the police forces are the unions. The chiefs are now pretty much figureheads. If we don't elect mayors and city councils that are ready to go to the mattresses with the police unions, it's only going to get worse.
We need to break the union contracts, break the police unions, and be ready to call in the national guard if that's how it shakes out.
Since I’m old enough to remember Kent State, I’m not so keen on involving the Guard. Even the MP’s are not trained for civilian policing. It’s not their job.
I appreciate the point you are making but the reality is that it will be necessary to have a force capable of maintaining order and of imposing the will of the broader society on the police. It is certainly true that liberals have ignored the management of both institutions for too long and have allowed them to become political institutions instead of functioning arms of the government which are dedicated to providing essential services to the public.
Billy Bratton was a terrific police chief pretty much everywhere he went, and seemed popular among cops as well as the general public. That's probably why Rudy Giuliani fired him in New York.
I like Kevin's optimism, but he is willfully ignorant. LA was not a scene of mostly peaceful protesting.
Protesters blocked the Hollywood Freeway, shattered the windows on cruisers, blocked local traffic and threw rocks. They broke windows of local businesses and damaged passing cars. They shot fireworks into buildings. Stores were vandalized and looted. Protesters shut down the 110 Freeway. They fought with police. Protesters put an officer in a chokehold and kicked him. Protesters set fires in trash cans, buildings, and lit police cruisers on fire. Store owners boarded up windows and wrote "black owned" in hopes they wouldn't be looted to no avail. The National Guard came in to protect the city and enforce a curfew.
But sure, peaceful.
@johnholbrook1
Throughout the year opportunist criminals and troublemakers used the protests and cover of night to create chaos, discredit the Black Lives Matter movement, and make off with some televisions. There were protesters and troublemakers. You and the police seem to have confused the two groups.
Hahahahaha
If you hadn’t misrepresented the incident following the shooting of deputy sheriffs in Compton in this thread, I would be less skeptical of this comment.