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                                                                                THE AFTERMATH, Page 38

Lessons of Los Angeles


Chief Daryl Gates claimed that his officers could cope with the
rage after the King verdict, but the police abandoned the city
to a mob

By WALTER SHAPIRO -- Reported by Tom Curry/New York and Jeanne
McDowell/Los Angeles


    "Sufficient manpower is a prerequisite for controlling
potentially dangerous crowds; the speed with which it arrives
may well determine whether the situation can be controlled."

    -- Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil
       Disorders, 1968


    Four hours -- 240 ugly, frightening Hobbesian min utes --
was all it took for South Central Los Angeles to lapse into a
violent state of anarchy. Four hours -- half a normal patrol
shift -- was all the time needed for the Los Angeles Police
Department to cede temporary control of the streets to looters
and arsonists. Even as the faint traces of smoke still linger
in the air, the L.A. riots have begun their transformation from
grisly reality to political cliches. Beginning with White House
press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, Republicans blamed the rioting
on everything from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to liberal
permissiveness. The Democratic response, from putative
presidential nominee Bill Clinton on down, was equally
predictable: this time the villains were a decade of Republican
neglect of urban problems and the laissez-faire moral climate
of the Reagan years.

    But each of these characterizations misses the point.
Despite their rage at the acquittal of the four policemen
charged with beating Rodney King, the vast majority of the
people in South Central L.A. did not degenerate into a mob
putting the torch to their own neighborhood -- or turn
themselves into a revolutionary army. Rather, they watched
helplessly as their troubled inner-city area, whose law-abiding
residents had been pleading for better police protection for
years, was pillaged and set aflame by hordes of looters. By all
indications, the rioting could have been contained with proper
planning, commitment of resources, leadership and an early and
prudent show of force by the Los Angeles police. All these
ingredients were tragically lacking in Los Angeles. The
performance of the L.A.P.D. during the crucial early moments of
the uprising is an object lesson in how not to deal with civil
disorders. Key mistakes:

    DERELICTION AT THE TOP: In many other cities, police chief
Daryl Gates would have been removed from office after the Rodney
King beating. Instead, the city's civil service laws give Mayor
Tom Bradley no authority over the city's top cop, who can be
fired only for corruption or criminal behavior. During his 14
years as chief, the controversial Gates had set the tenor of a
macho, take-no-nonsense police force. Despite cries for his
resignation, Gates clung to his job -- and only reluctantly
agreed to retire at the end of June. It was too late. On April
29, 3 1/2 hours after the verdict in the King case was
announced, Gates left his office at about 6:30 p.m. to drive 11
miles to attend a small political fund raiser in affluent
Brentwood. The cause was dear to his heart: opposition to a Los
Angeles ballot measure that would, at last, make the police
chief more accountable to elected officials. Even though Gates
claimed he was at the fund raiser for just five minutes (it was
closer to 20) and was in communication with commanders via radio
and cellular phone, he was at the fund raiser or on the road for
roughly 90 minutes when the police were losing control of the
situation in South Central L.A.

    AN INVISIBLE PLAN: Assistant police chief David Dotson
recounts that Gates rebuffed pleas from at least one
high-ranking officer to clarify issues such as the chain of
command in anticipation of the King verdict. The day before the
rioting, Gates had confidently assured city officials that the
police were prepared for anything. Even now he insists he had
reviewed detailed plans for dealing with civil unrest with his
commanding officers. But none of these purported preparations
were visible once the rioting started. In fact, it seemed as if
there was no plan at all. As law-enforcement expert Charles
Beene, a retired San Francisco police captain, explains, "You
must have plans in place: upwardly escalating in response
quicker than the looters can. When the bad guys see no response,
they instantly up their tactics: burning, looting, assaults."

    The comparatively small size of the Los Angeles police
force made matters worse. "Let's forget Chief Gates. You should
talk about the number of police," argues Rex Applegate, a
retired Army lieutenant colonel and a leading riot-control
specialist. "L.A. has about 8,000. New York City can field
30,000 officers and can flood a riot with blue uniforms." This
manpower shortage was compounded when police commanders failed
to declare a tactical alert soon enough, which would have
deployed additional officers to the initial trouble spots.

    A FATAL RETREAT: It was shortly after 5:30 on the fateful
afternoon of April 29 when a still containable riot turned into
a rout. Roughly 25 police officers were trying to restrain an
angry crowd at an intersection in South Central L.A.; an attempt
to make arrests prompted shouts, rock throwing and pushing and
shoving between the police and the mob. An amateur videotape
taken at the scene recorded a voice shouting over the police
loudspeaker, "I want everybody out of here. Florence and
Normandie. Everybody. Get out. Now." As the outnumbered police
drove off, the rioting roared out of control. Hapless motorists
caught in the intersection were dragged from their cars and
beaten. Looting and arson broke out a block away. Lieut. Mike
Moulin, the field commander who ordered the retreat, later
defended his decision: "I didn't want [the officers] killed.
It's really that simple."

    THE FAILURE TO REGROUP: What remains mystifying is why
more than 100 officers, seething with frustration, remained for
about the next two hours at their fallback position 1 1/2 miles
away, waiting for orders to move back in. The orders were
finally issued. For much of this period, Gates was either at the
fund raiser or in transit. "The command structure was not in
place. They didn't keep in touch," said deputy fire chief Donald
Anthony, who had 20 fire engines in place waiting for police
escorts. To law-enforcement strategists like Beene, the long
delay was fatal. "You think one hour isn't very long? One hour
in a crowd situation is like weeks or months," he said. Says
L.A. County sheriff Sherman Block: "It's my belief that a show
of force at [the intersection where the riot started] might
not have stopped everything but certainly would have had a
significant impact."

    FIDDLING AS A CITY BURNS: Even when the L.A.P.D. slowly
returned to the streets on the second day of rioting, it often
behaved as if afflicted by a kind of paralysis. In a typical
incident in the mid-Wilshire district, a phalanx of 50 police
officers guarded a Vons supermarket in the face of taunts from
looters. Frustrated, the crowd moved on to an unprotected
Thrifty drugstore a block away, which they proceeded to strip.
The police waited patiently at Vons until the looters began
leaving Thrifty and then -- and only then -- did they move in
with sirens blaring to "secure" the area. Meanwhile, in this
languid, but lethal, game of cat and mouse, the mob moved three
blocks down the street to attack a Find It All electronics
store. The police waited from the safety of Thrifty before
finally moving to try to capture the last few stragglers at the
Find It All store. The police grabbed several looters and
clubbed one man repeatedly. Then, as the rioters shouted their
defiance, the police freed everyone they were holding.

    Inexplicable scenes like this make it impossible to view
the L.A. riots solely as an outburst of self-destructive black
rage. By one preliminary estimate, more than half the people
arrested in the riot were Hispanic and 10% were white. Memories
of how long it took inner-city areas to recover from the
destruction of the Watts riots are still fresh in the minds of
many Los Angeles blacks, who despaired at a repetition of the
violence.

    Some people speculate that Gates wanted a civic
Gotterdammerung -- a traumatic breakdown that would somehow
justify his crude law-and-order faith. The Rev. Cecil Murray,
an influential black pastor, calls Gates "a proud man, almost
a vain man." Murray theorizes, "What better vindication upon
those who find him anathema than to let them write for him
[Gates] a blank check to destroy?" There is, however, no
evidence to support any conspiracy theory, and Gates instead
blames critics of the L.A.P.D.'S tough tactics for the chaotic
police response in the early phases of the rioting. "Police
officers on the street are scared to death to use any kind of
force," he argues, "because they think they're going to be
second-guessed."

    The police commission will soon begin an investigation
that may eventually provide an explanation of the L.A.P.D.'S
breakdown. Meanwhile, it is heartrending to wonder how much
destruction, how much lawlessness, how much human tragedy could
have been prevented if only the Los Angeles Police Department
had been prepared, had been resolute, and -- most important of
all -- had been well led.