The arrival of the guard was desperately anticipated in Los Angeles, where looting and fires spread overnight and left the city smoldering by daybreak on April 30. That morning, I waited outside the Los Angeles Coliseum, where guard units had deployed. But even as the day heated up, the guard troops remained frustratingly cabined inside their armories.
The trouble: Guard soldiers had made it to Los Angeles overnight, but devices to convert their automatic weapons into semiautomatics had not. When he learned of the holdup, Wilson ordered the guard soldiers to hit the streets with one bullet each, and by late afternoon, about 24 hours after violence first erupted, the guard finally began deploying from Exposition Park, home of the Coliseum.
One guardsman marched across the street to where I was standing, and as he and I took in the scene, a man pulled up in his pickup truck and began videotaping the melee. A rioter casually walked over, shot the man in the arm and grabbed his camera. Spotting the guard soldier, the shooter fled; the victim lived.
By the time guard units were fully at work, more than 25 people had died, nearly 600 were wounded and roughly 1,000 fires were burning or had burned.
The guard units were applauded, sometimes literally, as they made their way to ravaged sections of the city. I watched looters thumb their noses at police and then, moments later, melt away when they spotted guard soldiers rolling up to the scene; something about the military’s presence was both intimidating and soothing. In neighborhood after neighborhood, the arrival of the guard meant the diminishment of violence. “They were reassuring to the people who wanted their presence,” Wilson said.
But Los Angeles is a vast place and the guard’s slow deployment, complicated by the equipment issues, limited its initial effectiveness. Seeking to project force and deter violence, Wilson decided he needed a bigger show of force. That night, at 1 a.m. on May 1, Wilson formally asked President Bush to invoke the Insurrection Act and make active duty troops available as well. Bush approved Wilson’s request four hours later.
As it happens, the first troops to arrive were from Wilson’s former branch of the military, the Marines, deploying from Camp Pendleton, about 80 miles south. About 1,500 of them arrived in the city at roughly 2:30 p.m. on May 1; another 2,000 Army soldiers were dispatched from Fort Ord, an Army base 300 miles to the north.
But by the time soldiers and Marines were in position, the violence was already subsiding, so their mission was muddied from the start: Authorized to “restore law and order,” they were not empowered to “maintain law and order.” Some military leaders concluded that their authorization thus was no longer valid.
From then on, each request for military backup—including each request for the guard, which by then had been federalized—was evaluated according to whether it was a request to “restore” order or merely to “maintain” it. The process was cumbersome and sometimes slow: Marines took over traffic control points and escorted firefighters, for instance, but turned down requests to provide building security. Police often wanted backup to be extended indefinitely, but military officials sometimes felt forced to refuse.
Other complications ensued. Military commanders wrestled with the difficulties of applying military tactics in a domestic environment. They had to “exercise a degree of control that would be highly unusual (and completely unfeasible) in combat,” according to a military review of the period by Lt. Col. Christopher M. Schnaubelt. His report, “Lessons in Command and Control from the Los Angeles Riots,” is a meticulous reconstruction of those days from the perspective of the military.
In some cases, the cultures and practices of police and soldiers clashed, with dangerous implications. When one pair of LAPD officers, for instance, was preparing to enter a home in response to a report of a domestic dispute, the officers were accompanied by a contingent of Marines. The Marines held back as the officers approached the front door and were greeted with a blast of birdshot. The officers dropped to the ground and one called out, “cover me,” thinking the Marines would point their weapons at the house and be alert for any additional threat. Instead, the Marines opened fire, pummeling the home and its occupants, which included children, with more than 200 rounds. Amazingly, no one was hurt.
In the end, order was restored to Los Angeles, but the active duty forces supplied through the Insurrection Act were not instrumental in bringing peace to the city. Once its units took up positions, it was the National Guard forces that were key: I have no doubt that the Los Angeles riots would have lasted longer, spread farther and cost more lives were it not for Wilson’s activation of the guard and its eventual deployment across the torn areas of the city.
The record of the active-duty military is more ambiguous. The arrival of those forces came too late to evaluate how the military might have handled the riots at their height, but the problems that did arise—confusion about the mission, communications and cultural conflicts with the police—would only have been more acute had they arrived earlier, when the violence was more pitched.
Moreover, those conflicts took place under relatively protected circumstances: Although the local political leadership was frayed, federal and state authorities were in agreement about the need for troops and were communicating throughout. The problems of the 1992 response would surely have been exacerbated had the federal government attempted to impose military forces without the cooperation and agreement of the state, in that case, Gov. Wilson.
The Los Angeles riots were extraordinarily violent, but mercifully short-lived, in large measure because of the decisive actions taken by Wilson. They do not, however, stand for the principle that active duty military are the most effective means of suppressing urban violence. In Los Angeles, police and local leadership failed at the outset, to be rescued by state coordination and the National Guard. The Army and Marines came too late to make a difference but just in time to sow confusion and concern.
The history in Los Angeles suggests that solid coordination between the state and federal governments, along with decisive use of the National Guard, can save lives and protect property. It argues against employment of active-duty forces, certainly without consultation and consent of the states. In the current crisis, nothing from the Trump administration and its attorney general suggest that those officials have even considered the history that Barr himself lived.
Source: politico.com
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