In City After City, Police Completely Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests
In Gray Lady-ese, "In City After City" qualifies as disgusted, exasperated.
...a widespread failure in policing nationwide.
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...More than a dozen after-action evaluations have been completed, looking at how police departments responded to the demonstrations...
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...
The mistakes transcended geography, staffing levels and financial resources. From midsize departments...to big-city forces..., from top commanders to officers on the beat, police officers nationwide were unprepared to calm the...unrest, and their approaches consistently did the opposite. In many ways, the problems highlighted in the reports are fundamental to modern American policing...
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Officers need more training to manage their emotions and aggressions as part of de-escalation strategies.
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The reports are strikingly similar...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.
[Good for Baltimore. Man, they have had problems in the past.]
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...Indianapolis and Philadelphia, reviewers found, the actions of the officers seemed to make things worse.
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.
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[In Chicago] police intelligence suggested that a few hundred protesters would attend a planned demonstration; 30,000 people showed up...
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‘Warrior’ vs. ‘guardian’
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.
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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.
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.
No one knew who was in charge
[Same as in D.C. on 1/6.]
Senior law enforcement officers in Cleveland developed plans to manage a large protest but did not share the details with patrol supervisors.
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“What we’ve been doing needs to be acknowledged as a failure,” said Norm Stamper, a former police chief in Seattle...“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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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.
Okay, we're going to end on U. Reneé . No, U. Reneé , this is not a teachable moment. You have had too many of those already. You don't learn, U. Einstein's definition of insanity is repeating behavior proved to have failed. So no, Norm Stamper, you are not going to be doing this time and again in the future. Policing in America is broken. It has been for decades. There is an entire police culture separate from and antagonist to the larger culture. We have to start over. And that begins with DEFUND THE POLICE.
