Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, March 12, and I’m writing from Los Angeles.
Los Angeles was still under a nightly curfew when members of the L.A. City Council first called for an investigation into the tactics employed by the Los Angeles Police Department during the unrest that erupted after the death of George Floyd.
By the end of June, the council had voted unanimously to commission a report examining the LAPD’s crowd control tactics during the protests that dominated the city in late May and early June. Eight months later, that City Council-commissioned report is here — and it outlines many of the same failings that have been loudly voiced by activists and protesters since the summer.
The LAPD seriously mishandled its response to the summer protests, according to the independent report. The department’s failures were attributed to poor planning, inadequate training and a disregard for rules on mass arrests and crowd control that were established after past failures to manage protests.
[Read the full story: “Highly critical report faults LAPD for mishandling summer George Floyd unrest” in the Los Angeles Times]
As my colleagues Kevin Rector and Emily Alpert Reyes report, the analysis was conducted by a panel of former Police Department commanders led by Gerald Chaleff, an attorney and former member of the LAPD and the L.A. Police Commission who has helped review the department’s handling of past unrest.
[Previously: “Under lax protocol, LAPD responded to protests with aggressive force” in the Los Angeles Times on June 11]
The independent report found a “chaos of command” during the unrest where even the LAPD’s own command staff didn’t always know who was in charge. Secret “shadow teams” of undercover officers were sent into crowds without sufficient means of relaying their intelligence to commanders, according to the report. The report also found that officers were sent into the streets with hard-foam projectile weapons that they weren’t adequately trained to use, and police commanders without up-to-date training in crowd control tactics were put in charge of volatile scenes.
Kevin Rector, who covers the LAPD for The Times, has reported on multiple individuals who were badly wounded after being shot with 40-millimeter hard-foam projectiles at close range despite apparently representing little or no threat to officers.
[Read a summary of some of the key points in the report]
The LAPD said it would not comment on specific criticisms in the report before completing its own review of the summer events, which is pending, but that it has already made some changes based on lessons learned.
Melina Abdullah, co-founder of BLM-L.A., told my colleagues that the report addressed some of the wrongs that were perpetrated against protesters, but “what it doesn’t do is really critique the notion that LAPD should be putting down righteous protests in the first place.”
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