San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
REPORT CRITICAL OF LA MESA POLICE HANDLING OF RIOT
City-paid consultant says department was not prepared
The La Mesa Police Department was ill-prepared to respond to the riot that broke out the last weekend in May, an outside consultant concluded, and lacked the leadership, communication skills, training and policies that likely could have de-escalated the situation and prevented officers and civilians from being harmed.
In a report commissioned by the city that was released Friday, consultants Hillard Heintze LLC said the department’s nearly non-existent intelligence-gathering efforts caused it to underestimate the magnitude of the event that occurred the weekend of May 30-31 amid protests about racial justice and resulted in widespread looting, vandalism and destruction of public and private property.
Organizers of the May 30 social justice demonstration, which began in front of the La Mesa Police Department, said it was held to honor George Floyd, a Black man killed by a White Minnesota police officer on Memorial Day. But many at the event said they were also there to protest the May 27 treatment of Amaurie Johnson, a Black man, by La Mesa police Officer Matt Dages, who was later fired.
Johnson was filmed while he was being detained by Dages, who is White, at a San Diego Trolley stop near Grossmont Center, and the video was widely circulated on social media. Residents also cited the incident in 2018 where a Black Helix High School student was bodyslammed to the ground by a White police resource officer.
Hillard Heintze spent several months in La Mesa over the summer and fall interviewing city workers, elected officials, public safety employees, business owners, members of the La Mesa Citizens Public Safety Oversight Task Force and residents to glean insight to the civil unrest and precipitating events from May 25 through June 7. The firm reviewed documents, built a timeline and visited the sites of damaged and destroyed properties.
The report focuses on the city’s plans before the protests and riot, its response during the incident and how it followed up. Hillard Heintze notes that it was not looking to assign blame for the civil unrest, but said its report is for learning purposes and improvement in best practice efforts, and is “designed to assist the City of La Mesa with preparing for future incidents” and finding best practices going forward.
The consultants will present their findings Tuesday to the City Council. Because of COVID-19 precautions, the City Council meeting will be held online starting at 6 p.m., and the public is invited to be part of the discussion. The firm’s report is included with the City Council agenda and is available at https:// www.cityoflamesa.us/agendacenter/viewfile/ Item/5391?fileid=13691 Among its discoveries: • The La Mesa Police Department designated a command post and command structure, but neither was able to support an effective response to the growing anger by a mob of protesters who were just outside the police station in downtown La Mesa.
• The city insufficiently prepared its operational plans for protests the night before on May 29, an issue that also came to light on May 30. They wrote: “The operations plans did not include much of the information that is standard within the law enforcement community for developing a comprehensive operations plan. This missing information is important for commanders, supervisors and officers in the field to understand and follow. The absence of some of this information was in part due to the lack of available information regarding the details of the protest, including the inability to identify and connect with an event organizer for the May 30 protest.”
• There was no defined plan of communication between the Police Department, city officials and the community, leading to struggles by all parties to understand and react to the events as they were happening, and even afterward.
They wrote: “In addition to the responding agencies’ inability to communicate seamlessly on a single radio channel, the SDCSD (San Diego County Sheriff’s Department) dispatchers and LMPD analysts monitoring social media determined that protesters had discovered the primary radio communication channel and were broadcasting their communications on a live stream. This information informed protestors of police strategies, including locations that responding officers were attempting to reach. As those officers followed the directions from the dispatchers, the officers were met by individuals throwing rocks at the patrol cars, breaking windows and forcing the officers to retreat.”
• The city’s Fire Department was unable to attend to fires set to two banks and another building in the downtown area because they could not be sufficiently protected by officers from the violence under way (including rocks, bottles and fireworks being launched).
• The Police Department’s decision to keep officers out of sight from the public may have led to increased and widespread violence.
Hillard Heintze also offered key recommendations to correct the Police Department’s inadequacies. The firm suggested the department revise its policies regarding crowds and protests in response to First Amendment events and stick to adhering to principles of the National Incident Management System and the Incident Command System.
Also on Tuesday’s agenda is a response by the acting La Mesa chief of police, Capt. Matt Nicholass, to the report’s recommendations. Nicholass wrote that the department has already drawn on its experience from May 30-31 “to implement new practices during subsequent protest events” and that the department will “continuously strive for improvement.”