Kim Barker, Mike Baker and
For
many long weeks last summer, protesters in American cities faced off against
their own police forces in what proved to be, for major law enforcement
agencies across the country, a startling display of violence and disarray.
Now, months after the demonstrations that followed the killing
of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May, the full scope of the
country’s policing response is becoming clearer. More than a dozen after-action
evaluations have been completed, looking at how police departments responded to
the demonstrations — some of them chaotic and violent, most peaceful — that
broke out in hundreds of cities between late May and the end
of August.
In city after city, the reports are a damning indictment of
police forces that were poorly trained, heavily militarized and stunningly
unprepared for the possibility that large numbers of people would surge into
the streets, moved by the graphic images of Mr. Floyd’s death under a police
officer’s knee.
The mistakes transcended geography, staffing levels and
financial resources. From midsize departments like the one in Indianapolis to
big-city forces like New York City’s, from top commanders to officers on the
beat, police officers nationwide were unprepared to calm the summer’s unrest,
and their approaches consistently did the opposite. In many ways, the problems
highlighted in the reports are fundamental to modern American policing, a
demonstration of the aggressive tactics that had infuriated many of the
protesters to begin with.
The New
York Times reviewed reports by outside investigators, watchdogs and consultants
analyzing the police response to protests in nine major cities, including four
of the nation’s largest. The Times also reviewed after-action examinations by
police departments in five other major cities. Reports in some cities, such
as Oakland and
Seattle, are not yet completed. In Minneapolis, the city that sparked a
national reckoning over policing, the City Council only agreed last month to
hire a risk-management company to analyze the city’s response to the protests,
despite months of pressure.
Almost uniformly, the reports said departments need more
training in how to handle large protests. They also offered a range of
recommendations to improve outcomes in the future: Departments need to better
work with community organizers, including enlisting activists to participate in
trainings or consulting with civil rights attorneys on protest-management
policies. Leaders need to develop more restrictive guidelines and better
supervision of crowd control munitions, such as tear gas. Officers need more
training to manage their emotions and aggressions as part of de-escalation
strategies.
A report from the New York City Department of Investigation noted
that most officers had not been adequately trained for policing protests.
Those
first days of protest after Mr. Floyd’s killing presented an extraordinary law
enforcement challenge, experts say, one that few departments were prepared to
tackle. Demonstrations were large, constant and unpredictable, often springing
up organically in several neighborhoods at once. While the vast majority of
protests were peaceful, in cities like New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Portland, buildings were looted and fires were set, and demonstrators hurled firecrackers and Molotov cocktails at law enforcement officers. At
least six people were killed; hundreds were injured;
thousands were arrested.
The
reports are strikingly similar, a point made by the Indianapolis review,
which said that officers’ responses “were not dissimilar to what appears to
have occurred in cities around the country.” Of the outside reviews, only the
police department in Baltimore was credited with
handling protests relatively well. The department deployed officers in ordinary
uniforms and encouraged them “to calmly engage in discussion” with protesters,
the report said.
Reviewers more often found that officers behaved aggressively,
wearing riot gear and spraying tear gas or “less-lethal” projectiles in
indiscriminate ways, appearing to target peaceful demonstrators and displaying
little effort to de-escalate tensions. In places like Indianapolis and
Philadelphia, reviewers found, the
actions of the officers seemed to make things worse.
Departments
also were criticized for not planning for protests, despite evidence that they
would be large. In Los Angeles, “the lack of adequate planning and
preparation caused the Department to be reactive, rather than proactive,”
inhibiting the officers’ ability to control the violence committed by small
groups of people.
As with
the protests in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 that culminated in the Capitol
riot, police also did not understand how angry people were,
in some cases because they lacked resources devoted to intelligence and
outreach that would have put them in better touch with their communities.
“American
police simply were not prepared for the challenge that they faced in terms of
planning, logistics, training and police command-and-control supervision,” said
Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a
nonprofit that advises departments on management and tactics.
Police
departments in some cities have fought back against the findings, arguing that
officers were asked to confront unruly crowds who lit fires, smashed shop
windows and sometimes attacked the police. Business owners, downtown residents
and elected leaders demanded a strong response against protesters who were
often never held accountable, the police have said.
“Heaping
blame on police departments while ignoring the criminals who used protests as
cover for planned and coordinated violence almost guarantees a repeat of the
chaos we saw last summer,” said Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Police
Benevolent Association in New York City.
On May
29, Indianapolis police showed up with helmets, face shields, reinforced vests
and batons. Protesters told investigators this “made the police look
militarized and ready for battle.”
At a largely peaceful Chicago protest on May 30, a demonstrator
later told the inspector general’s office, the mood shifted when the police
arrived. “They were dressed in riot gear,” the protester said. He added: “They
had batons in their hands already.”
The Office of Inspector General in Chicago described a disconnect
in how the police response was viewed by leadership and rank-and-file officers.
The
reports repeatedly blamed police departments for escalating violence instead of
taming it. At times, police looked as if they were on the front lines of a war.
They often treated all protesters the same, instead of differentiating between
peaceful protesters and violent troublemakers. In part, the reports
acknowledged, that was because of the chaos. But it was also because the
protests pitted demonstrators against officers, who became defensive and
emotional in the face of criticism, some reports said.
In
Portland, where protests continued nightly, police officers used force more
than 6,000 times during six months, according to lawyers with the U.S.
Department of Justice, which reviewed officers’ actions as part of a previous
settlement agreement. The review found that the force sometimes deviated from
policy; one officer justified firing a “less-lethal impact munition” at someone
who had engaged in “furtive conversation” and then ran away.
In
Denver, officers used similar “less lethal” weapons against people who yelled
about officers’ behavior. Officers also improperly fired projectiles that hit
or nearly hit heads and faces, according to the report by
the city’s independent police monitor. In Raleigh, N.C., a consulting firm that
reviewed body cameras and other footage said videos appeared to show officers
using pepper spray indiscriminately.
None of these findings were new.
Police officers using pepper spray on protesters near the Colorado State Capitol in Denver in May
For
decades, criminal justice experts have warned that warrior-like police tactics
escalate conflict at protests instead of defusing it. Between 1967 and 1976,
three federal commissions investigated protests and riots. All found that
police wearing so-called “riot gear” or deploying military-style weapons and
tear gas led to the same kind of violence police were supposed to prevent.
In 2015, after national protests over the killing by police of
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., another presidential task force said
police should promote a “guardian” mind-set instead of that of a “warrior,” and
avoid visible riot gear and military-style formations at protests.
U.
Reneé Hall, who resigned as the chief of the Dallas Police Department in the
aftermath of protests, said the recent assessments have provided a learning
opportunity for departments nationwide.
Understand the George
Floyd Case
- On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis
police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, after a
convenience store clerk claimed he used a counterfeit $20 bill to buy
cigarettes.
- Mr. Floyd died after Derek
Chauvin, one of the police officers, handcuffed him and pinned him to the
ground with a knee, an episode that was captured on video.
- Mr. Floyd’s death set off a series of nationwide protests
against police brutality.
- Mr. Chauvin was fired from the Minneapolis
police force, along with three other officers. He has been charged with
both second- and third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He
now faces trial. Opening statements are scheduled for March 29.
- Here is what we know up to this point in the
case, and how the trial is expected to unfold.
“We did
the same things and made a lot of the same mistakes,” Ms. Hall said.
For
years, only Los Angeles police who were certified and frequently trained to use
a 40-millimeter “less lethal” weapon — usually loaded with hard-foam
projectiles — could use it to control crowds.
In 2017, the weapon’s use was expanded to other officers. But
the new training lasted only two hours. It consisted of learning how to
manipulate the weapon and firing it a few times at a stationary target.
The
independent report on the Los Angeles police, commissioned by the City Council,
said officers who may have had insufficient training in how to use the weapons
fired into dynamic crowds. “To be precise takes practice,” it said.
Multiple
reports said these projectiles injured people, including the homeless man in a
wheelchair.
Several
reports faulted departments for failing to train officers to de-escalate
conflict, control crowds and arrest large numbers of people. In Raleigh, N.C.,
officers said they were supposed to be trained to manage crowds annually, but
those trainings were often canceled. Most Portland police officers had not
received “any recent skills training in crowd management, de-escalation,
procedural justice, crisis prevention, or other critical skills for preventing
or minimizing the use of force,” the city’s report found.
In Chicago, investigators could not even determine the last time
that officers had been trained in mass arrests, but the most recent possible
time was likely before a NATO summit meeting in 2012.
In Chicago, reviewers noted that the police force was not
adequately trained to conduct mass arrests.
The
Chicago police response on the night of May 29, when hundreds of people marched
through the streets, “was marked by poor coordination, inconsistency, and
confusion,” the city’s Office of Inspector General found.
The
next day, police intelligence suggested that a few hundred protesters would
attend a planned demonstration; 30,000 people showed up. Senior police
officials in Chicago, when interviewed after the protests ended, still did not
know who was in charge of responding to the demonstrations that day. “The
accounts of senior leadership on this point were sharply conflicting and
profoundly confused,” the report said.
The police were supposed to have “mass arrest” kits to take
large numbers of people into custody, but many kits were from 2012, the report
found.
The
arrest cards inside the kits were sometimes outdated; the plastic handcuffs in
many kits were decayed or broken, a senior police officer later told investigators.
Early on May 30, the department’s deputy chief of operations emailed another
command staff member requesting 3,000 flex cuffs for the following day.
The email recipient gave no indication that the department
“could not supply that number of flex cuffs, simply replying ‘[o]kay, will
do,’” the report found, describing this as a signal of “a widespread,
multi-faceted system failure from beginning to end.”
Chicago
police also did not have enough computers to process large numbers of
arrestees. In Los Angeles, police did not have enough buses to transport arrested
people — a problem the department has had for a decade — and did not plan
appropriately for field jails.
Senior
law enforcement officers in Cleveland developed
plans to manage a large protest but did not share the details with patrol
supervisors. Dallas officials said the
department had trouble figuring out how to get water to officers on the front
lines.
The
reviews did not examine protesters’ complaints of racial bias in policing. But
activists in Indianapolis told reviewers they wanted an acknowledgment by the
department that systemic racism exists. The Portland Police Bureau said it was
planning anti-racism training for all officers.
All
told, the reports suggest the likelihood of problems in the event of future
protests. The trial now underway in Minneapolis of the officer
facing the most serious charges in Mr. Floyd’s death, Derek Chauvin, is one potential trigger.
“What
we’ve been doing needs to be acknowledged as a failure,” said Norm Stamper, a
former police chief in Seattle, who said he made some of the same missteps
while trying to contain the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in
1999, when tear gas unleashed by officers triggered an escalating backlash.
Now, he looks back on that moment as one of his greatest regrets
in decades in law enforcement. “We continue to make the same mistakes,” Mr.
Stamper said. “We’ll be doing this time and time again in the years ahead,
unless we are ready for a hard assessment.”
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