The Evolution of Riot Response. Crowd control has come a long way

EVERYTHING IS UNDER (CROWD) CONTROL: The Evolution of Riot Response.

Crowd control has come a long way since Chicago police, armed only with batons, sunglasses, and a healthy hatred of spoiled frat boys, crushed hippie riots in the summer of 1968. In 2005, the department upgraded to the Damascus riot control kit. In those halcyon days, police departments issued press releases about their ability to outfit officers with torso and shoulder pads, forearm guards, knee and shin guards, elbow pads, protective gloves, and duffel bags. Such toys are only as good as the willingness to deploy them: The city incurred $66 million in damages following the George Floyd riots in 2020.

The Chicago police department’s new crowd control policy, released for public comment in June, says its officers “will remain impartial and neutral in their views in all communications with individuals in the crowd, while affirming that the First Amendment rights of lawful participants are protected.” Democrats were very lenient on First Amendment-inspired arson in 2020, but one gets the sense that Chicago authorities will be less tolerant of such activity now that the nation’s eyes are on Kamala Harris’ coronation in August at the Democratic National Convention.

They’re getting help from the Secret Service — if that’s a good thing after the incompetence displayed in the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in July. Chicago police said more than 2,000 officers received 48 hours of new training ahead of the DNC. There was also an increase in surveillance equipment covering the city — courtesy of the Secret Service.

Bryce Eddy believes that even after the summer conventions, there will likely be more riots due to political unrest in the coming months. Eddy serves on the board of the Center for Security Policy, where he has helped partner private security with law enforcement agencies to help train for crowd control. He was on the front lines of the 2020 LA riots.

“COVID and the BLM riots have changed so much,” he says. “Police departments across the country have been overwhelmed. Normally they would rely on each other for what we call ‘mutual aid.’ But now there are agreements between high-level security companies and police departments that are evolving into a situation where the security companies can provide additional services and what they call mutual aid, which, again, is usually only between law enforcement departments.”

Flashback to late May 2020: Mayor Moron is destroying major cities in America.

There is a validated playbook for dealing with riots. It is a story of two riots in the terrible summer of widespread racial unrest in 1967. Eugene Methvin’s 1991 National assessment ““riot primer” recorded the script:

In a nutshell, riots begin when a group of social forces temporarily overwhelm or paralyze the police, who stand by and their highly visible inaction signals to the small percentage of teenage embryonic psychopaths and hardened young adults that a moral holiday is coming. This criminal minority leads the torching of cars, the smashing of windows, the bloodshed, and the harassment of hate targets like blacks, white merchants, or lone officers. Then the magnetism brings out the great crowds of older men, women, and children to share in the Roman carnival of looting. Then the great killing begins: slow runners are caught in burning buildings and—as the civic forces mobilize—in police and National Guard gunfire.…

The time to stop a riot is right at the beginning, by cutting off the criminal spearhead with precise and overwhelming force. The police will usually be surprised (no pun intended) by the initial outbreak. But they must jump into a prearranged mobilization that should always be on standby in any large city, just like the disaster response program of the fire department or the hospital.

Methvin compared two riots in July 1967. In Toledo, rioters began smashing things and throwing rocks at police cars. The authorities immediately and decisively shouted, arrested the thugs, and within 36 hours order was restored. No one died. Not so in Detroitwhere authorities decided to let the rioters vent their steam. Five days of violence followed, with more than 40 dead and over 1,000 injured. Property damage was estimated at more than $40 million, about $300 million in 2020 dollars. It was the worst riot in America since the New York City draft riots of 1863, which were only surpassed in scale by the Rodney King riots of 1992.

And there is a lasting loss for failing to do so. South Central Los Angeles never recovered from the double whammy of the Watts fires of 1965 and 1992. Detroit and Newark never recovered from the devastation of 1967. Washington, D.C., never fully recovered from the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. As Methvin noted, the Mount Pleasant riots in the nation’s capital in 1991 gave the new mayor a crash course in the right and wrong way to handle violent unrest:

In Washington, D.C., on Sunday, May 5, a black female police officer attempted to arrest a Hispanic man who was drunk and unruly on a street in the Mount Pleasant area, home to many recent Central American immigrants. The man pulled out a knife and approached, the officer said, and she shot and seriously wounded him. Word spread that he was dead, shot while he was handcuffed. A fire broke out as hundreds of youths set fire to police cars, smashed windows and looted. Washington‘s new mayor, Sharon Pratt Dixon, initially ordered police to disperse the crowd, but no arrests were made. The second night, gangs of youths fought a thousand police officers, setting fires and looting as they dispersed. Mayor Dixon then imposed a curfew and ordered arrests, and the violence subsided. Police made 230 arrests in three days.

QED

Yet that same year, New York Mayor David Dinkins took a “let off steam” approach, when black rioters marched through the streets of Crown Heights chanting “Heil Hitler!” as they attacked Jews after a rabbi’s car accidentally struck two children, killing one. A rabbinical student — a visiting student from Australia, a more civilized place than New York City in 1991 — was stabbed to death. (It should be noted that in both the Mount Pleasant and Crown Heights cases, the crowds were reacting violently to rumors of police misconduct that turned out to be untrue.)

That eternal lesson has been forgotten, however, as the current mayor of the capital is almost as much of an idiot as America’s idiot of Minneapolis. number onerefused to help the Secret Service guard the White House when rioters stormed it. The Secret Service, knowing what to do, immediately suppressed the violence.

The full bill for the current devastation of countless cities across the country, with neighborhoods burned beyond repair, will run into the billions. On top of that, there are the businesses that will never reopen and the lives of innocent homeowners and their families that have been ruined. Worse, the bill comes on the heels of a pandemic that will continue to increase reconstruction costs and reduce potential revenues for a long time to come..

The 2020 riots came as a surprise to many, and they shouldn’t have. By now we should know: welcome to the protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics remain the same.

And while we’re on the subject: Harris/Walz: Mostly peaceful.