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Policing tactics vary from city to city amid protests
Retreat or deploy? How cops respond in riots on display
LOS ANGELES — On two consecutive nights of unruly protests against police brutality, officers retreated from their posts in some cities, while in others, they deployed batons, flashbang grenades and tear gas to quell the unrest.
The range of responses exacerbated tensions with the protesters in several locations and brought global attention to the tactics police use during riots as they try to find a balance between keeping the peace and protecting the safety of officers and the public.
The protests came in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis after a white police officer pressed a knee into the 46-year-old black man’s neck for more than eight minutes on Memorial Day. Floyd was handcuffed as Officer Derek Chauvin pushed his face into the pavement amid his pleas for help.
Tensions reached a crescendo Friday night as protests erupted in cities across America.
On their smart phones, social media feeds and TVs, viewers saw the extremes in tactics play out, even as the majority of cops nationwide tried to keep the peace.
In Minneapolis, leaders decided to evacuate a police precinct Thursday and surrender it to protesters who set it on fire. Protesters also broke into the police headquarters Friday in Portland, Oregon, and ignited a fire.
In New York, officers used batons and shoved protesters down as they took people into custody and cleared the streets. One video showed an officer slam a woman to the ground as he walked past her in the street.
In Los Angeles, police officers arrested more than 500 protesters Friday night.
Minneapolis police and Mayor Jacob Frey have been criticized for the noticeably non-confrontational strategy Thursday in handling the protests after Floyd’s death.
After being fired, Chauvin was arrested Friday and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
“Brick and mortar is not as important as life,” Frey said.
To some, the act of protesters taking over the evacuated Minneapolis precinct amid fires could stoke further flames.
“You’ve got to defend that,” said former Los Angeles Police Deputy Chief Michael Downing. “That’s your command operation. Symbolically, it looks very bad if you have to give that up.”
Downing witnessed the Los Angeles riots firsthand in 1992 following the acquittal of four officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King.
In Los Angeles, the center of the uprising was an intersection, Florence and Normandie avenues, and the violence spiraled into five days of riots and fires. More than 60 people died, including 10 fatally shot by law enforcement.
In 1992, then-Lt. Downing would typically oversee that intersection, but he was on vacation studying for a promotional exam. A different lieutenant was in charge instead.
The lieutenant made a decision: He ordered his officers to abandon the intersection. An hour later, a truck driver was pulled from his vehicle and brutally beaten by rioters.
“I think that sent a signal to the rest of the city,” said Downing, who immediately rushed to work.
“When you have that coupled with political leadership saying ‘show your anger, go to the streets’ it was kind of like permission to go out and misbehave and be violent,” he said.
Nearly 30 years later, police officers around the country were confronted with an eerily similar dilemma, even as National Guard troops arrived in some cities.
The presence of armed National Guard troops on the streets in Minneapolis and elsewhere brings back memories of the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s and ’70s, but they are only there as a support to local law enforcement and do not have the authority to make arrests.
They can use their weapons in “self defense” but are trained in less lethal crowd control tactics that attempt to deescalate tensions, unlike the combat techniques that have largely been abandoned since the Kent State University shootings in Ohio in 1970 when the state’s National Guard killed four students and wounded nine.
Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, said that when deciding how to manage protests, police and political leaders look for ways to facilitate “legitimate outpourings of anger” while trying to limit the likelihood of injury and property destruction. But he said the difficulty is trying to strike that balance.
“The crisis of police legitimacy has become so great that then to use the police to manage the situation just enflames the problem,” said Vitale, who has studied the policing of protests for two decades.