3 days ago
After 2020, Report Urged Caution in Deploying National Guard in L.A.
During the volatile early days of the racial justice protests in 2020, city officials in Los Angeles at first resisted calling for National Guard assistance before deciding that troops were needed to control crowds.
The Guard troops, arriving in Humvees with combat gear, acted as a supplement to the local police, providing security at shopping centers and at City Hall. Still, their presence met with public resistance in a city that has a history of high-profile confrontations between protesters and the police. In the aftermath of the 2020 response, the nonprofit National Police Foundation warned that future National Guard deployments in Los Angeles should come with coordinated messaging before, during and afterward 'to avoid them being seen as an occupying force.'
Yet as protests returned to the city over the weekend in response to a series of federal immigration raids, there has been no coordinated messaging or even agreement about the deployment of the National Guard. President Trump ordered the troops into Los Angeles, even as state and local politicians warned that doing so would inflame tensions rather than ease them.
'This is exactly what Donald Trump wanted,' Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said on Monday, announcing that the state would sue the Trump administration over the deployment.
When and how to use the National Guard were among the many lessons from raucous demonstrations over policing that broke out across the country in 2020 in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd. Many after-action reports and independent reviews blamed police departments for mishandling protests, citing insufficient training and militarized responses that made tense situations worse.
Some police departments, such as the one in Raleigh, N.C., were found to have used pepper spray indiscriminately. Denver officers were found to have inappropriately used weapons such as tear gas and pepper-spray balls against people who were yelling about officer behavior but not involved in any physical resistance. Officers in Portland, Ore., where protests persisted for months, used force more than 6,000 times — and a federal review found that some uses were contrary to what is allowed under policy guidelines, such as when officers used a weapon against someone because that person had engaged in 'furtive conversation.'
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