Flaws found in coordination during protests
In the midst of rowdy protests, arsons and other property damage in Los Angeles this summer, officials from various city agencies that had been called into the field were requesting escorts from the already-overwhelmed Los Angeles Police without any centralized coordination and at times in areas where there was no unrest.
When the National Guard arrived to help quell the chaos, officials in the city’s Emergency Operations Center were unsure of the troops’ marching orders — and didn’t know what they were allowed to do.
And as local leaders instituted nightly curfews, there was no plan for disseminating the information to the public or the thousands of protesters in the streets — many of whom would subsequently be arrested.
Those findings and others are laid out in a draft “after action report” on the handling of the protests by the Los Angeles Emergency Management Department, which worked to coordinate the city’s response by providing logistical support to the LAPD and other agencies in the field.
The report was posted online as part of the September agenda of the department’s Emergency Management Committee, which is composed of emergency managers from different departments in the city. Jessica Kellogg, a spokeswoman for the emergency department, said the report is still being revised.
It will eventually have to be approved by the department’s Emergency Operations Board, but Kellogg said she was not sure when that would occur.
The report focuses on the efforts of its staff to coordinate responses between agencies from their downtown emergency center.
It notes that, when the protests erupted in late May, the Operations Center was already up and running during weekday hours as part of the city’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. That made ramping up to a round-the-clock emergency posture in response to the protests easier in some ways but harder in others, the report found.
The report found that “partnerships and open communication already established since March of 2020 for the pandemic, resulted in a more ... effective coordinated response.”
But it also noted that there were no clear guidelines for filling out required paperwork for two simultaneous emergencies, including status reports intended to convey to top officials where the city stood on any given day in terms of emergency resources and needs.
The dual emergencies also presented other hurdles, including forcing the LAPD to “establish a system to separate calls related to the protests and those related to COVID-19,” the report found.