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189
The Los Angeles Riots: A Study in
Crisis Paralysis1
Abraham H. Miller*
Although social scientists have sought to understand riots in terms of social structure, few
causal explanations have withstood the tests of ongoing empirical examination. In America,
presidential commissions sought to put the black urban riots of the mid-sixties in a similar
context. Despite the laudable attempts at deriving benign policy implications from such
explanations, the commissions' explanations were no better than the social science of the time.
Understanding the causal basis of riots has been elusive, but our understanding of riots as
problems of crisis management has been far more reachable. A comparison of two Los Angeles
riots, Watts 1965, and the Rodney King riots of 1992, shows that the intensity, spread and
duration of the riots were a function of crisis paralysis. We might not know, in any scientific
sense, what causes riots but we appear to know a great deal about the consequences of not
appropriately preparing for or managing riots. These are the lessons of both Los Angeles
riots.2
Introduction: The Futile Search for
Primary Causes of Riots
In the mid-1960s, America's inner cities
exploded in what became known as the `Black
urban riots.' Confrontations over civil rights had
dominated American politics in the early 1960s,
but these episodes largely took place in the
American South in the form of non-violent
protests. White Americans living in the North
saw demonstrations in Mississippi and Alabama
as something taking place in another country.
Absent `de jure' segregation in the North,
communities in this part of America often turned
a blind eye to the system of `de facto'
segregation that made residential and schooling
patterns of Northern communities every bit as
divided by race as those in the South.
Black civil rights demonstrators in the South
had embraced the tactic and ethos of nonviolence, following the example and leadership
of civil rights leader and Nobel laureate, Dr.
Martin Luther King. The police, not the demonstrators, brought violence to these protests. In
sharp contrast to the non-violence of the civil
rights movement in the South, the Black urban
riots in the North were very violent; so much so
that they astounded the larger society. The three
most violent of these episodes took place in the
Northern cities of Los Angeles (Watts), Detroit,
and Newark. These names have become almost
synonymous with the riots.
Coming on the heels of one of the most placid
political decades in American history, the riots
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350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
were almost incomprehensible. That the riots
took place in those parts of America where
Blacks suffered the least economic deprivation
and where legal segregation did not exist,
further added to the nation's inability to
comprehend fully what was happening. As other
forms of collective violence burst forth on the
nation's campuses and streets to protest
America's involvement in the ever-escalating
war in Vietnam, the American people found that,
far from being removed from collective violence,
such episodes were becoming a common part of
their experience.
To deal with these seemingly unusually
phenomena, two presidential commissions were
established. The best known of these is the
Kerner Commission (The National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders), named after
its chairman, Otto Kerner, former governor of
Illinois. The mandate of the Kerner Commission
was to find the causes of the Black urban riots
and to propose policies to prevent their future
occurrences (Kerner Commission, 1968: 1). A
second and much less well-remembered presidential commission was charged with a similar
but broader mandate into the investigation of
violence in America. This was the Eisenhower
Commission (National Commission on the
Causes and Prevention of Violence), which was
named after its chairman, Dr. Milton Eisenhower,
Columbia University president and brother of
President Dwight David Eisenhower.
In
analyzing the urban riots, the Eisenhower
commission largely reinforced the work of its
Volume 9
* Department of Political
Science,
University
of
Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210375,
1110 Crosley Tower, Cincinnati, OH 45220-0375, United
States. E-mail: millerah@email.
uc.edu.
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more visible sister commission and over the
years has stood in its shadow (Skolnick, 1969;
Howell, 1988).
Both commissions focused on the root causes
of the 1960s ghetto riots and found those causes
to be `poverty' and `despair.' This focus was not
without a strong policy agenda that was directly
linked to the causal interpretation of the riots.
Then, as now, those who interpret the riots from
a `deprivation' perspective call for a massive
infusion of federal dollars into the inner cities.
Social scientists followed in the footsteps of
the commissions and sought to document the
impact of primary causes on the riots, generally
in the form of deprivation theory (both relative
and absolute). The thrust of these theories is that
disparities between an individual's actual need
fulfillment and expectations of need fulfillment
have the potential to lead to violence. Disparities
between expectations and reality are a common
component of the human experience. When they
occur within certain parameters, known to
deprivation theorists as tolerable differences or
tolerable gaps, they can easily be endured. When
the gap extends beyond certain assumed
parameters, the disparity is no longer tolerable
and results in frustration.3
Although the concept of relative deprivation,
as distinct from absolute deprivation, can be
traced back to the works of Karl Marx and was
applied by the distinguished sociologist Robert
K. Merton (1963) to reference group theory, it
was James C. Davies (1970) who first applied it
in a quasi-empirical fashion to a broad range of
incidents of collective violence, including the
Black urban riots.4 At the time of the Kerner and
Eisenhower commission reports, relative deprivation was the single most prominent explanation
of collective violence. This can be seen in
Graham and Gurr's (1970) edited volume, The
History of Violence in America, a report submitted
to the Eisenhower Commission, where relative
deprivation figures prominently as both an
explanation of collective violence generally and
the Black urban riots specifically.
Subsequent empirical work, however, increasingly began to call into question the theory of
relative deprivation.5 Deprivation (relative or
absolute) could not explain the riots once the
size of the Black community was controlled
(Spilerman, 1970). Clark McPhail (1971) tested
the deprivation theory of the riots on individual
level data from five major riots and could not
find confirmation of deprivation theory as a
primary explanation of riot behavior. Edward N.
Muller (1972) found that other variables, such as
a belief in the efficacy of violent protest and low
degree of trust in authorities, were far better
explanatory variables of riots than deprivation.
Muller's work influenced Ted Robert Gurr to
give up on relative deprivation as the primary
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December 2001
theoretical explanation of the Black urban riots
(Brush, 1996).6
Because of the emphasis on primary causes
and the linkages between identified causes and
public policy, discussions of secondary causes ±
the management of riots ± received scant
attention. The Kerner Commission did deal, to
some degree, with the issues of police preparedness and police behavior, but this attention had
more to do with police precipitating riots than
with ineffectual police response as a secondary
cause. Certainly, it is possible to cull from the
hundreds of pages of the Kerner report
statements about police preparedness, but
neither the thrust of the report itself nor the
media's interpretation of the report has been
concerned with police response as a management
issue.
Journalist Eugene Methvin (1970: 478), in a
departure from the orthodoxy of his time,
argued that in Los Angeles (Watts), Newark
and Detroit, the cities with the most intense
riots, the police immediately retreated from the
scene of the disorder. In other words, the riots
grew because of poor police preparedness and
response. In Newark, for example, Director of
Public Safety Dominick Spina arrived on the
scene of the riot to find his officers, `. . . crouched
behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on
the ground . . .' (Kerner Commission, 1968: 3). In
Detroit, the police removed street cordons
permitting the looters to have freer access to
their loot. This passivity seemed to stimulate the
actions of the rioters (Janowitz, 1969: 505). As
one participant in the Detroit riot described it,
`Those first hours, when the cops pulled out,
were just like a holiday. . . All the kids wandered
around sayin' real amazed like, ``the fuzz is scard;
they ain't goin' to do nothin'' ' (quoted in
Methvin, 1970: 101).
In their own argot, rioters repeatedly
described how they would scatter when the
police passed by and then return emboldened
when they realized the police were not going to
get out of their automobiles. Tony, a rioter in
London's `Battle of Trafalgar' put it this way: `I
did what I did because I could' (quoted in
Waddington, 1992: 25). This type of behavior
led Janowitz (1969: 503) to observe that `[t]here
can be no doubt that the countermeasures
employed deeply influence the course of rioting
± even in the prolonging of the period of
reestablishing law and order.' As in the case with
prison riots, for instance, the quality and
efficiency of crisis management influences how
quickly and completely the system is returned to
normalcy (Boin and Van Duin, 1995).7
Although it is quite conceivable that primary
causes of riots do exist, more than thirty years of
social science research has yet to show that they
do and what they are. Riots should be viewed as
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THE LOS ANGELES RIOTS: A STUDY IN CRISIS PARALYSIS
a process which unfolds through time (Miller,
1999). The process is affected both by the everchanging behavior of rioters8 and the responses
to that behavior by agents of social control.
Chalmers Johnson (1966) made a similar
observation with regard to revolutions. Their
successes or failures were seen as a function of
the responses of elite decision makers, an
observation also made by Alexis de Tocqueville
(1955) in his analysis of the collapse of the Old
Regime in France. In the succinct words of Boin
and Van Duin (1995): crisis management counts.
Indeed, the duration, intensity and spread of a
riot is more a function of how the riot is
managed than the result of the `root causes'
discussed above. In the remainder of this chapter,
I will look generally at the urban riots of the
1960s and then at the two famous Los Angeles
riots, the Watts riot of 1965 and, most explicitly,
the so-called `Rodney King riot' of 1992. My
purpose in looking at the Watts riot of the 1960s
is to provide context for a better understanding
of the Los Angeles riot of April 29, 1992. It is
this riot that will be the main focus of this
chapter.
Crisis Management and the Los
Angeles Riots: Watts 1965
The second week of August 1965 was an
atypically hot and humid one in Los Angeles.
Accustomed to pleasant ocean breezes and dry,
moderate temperatures, Los Angeles residents
were not prepared for the muggy evening of
August 11, 1965, which forced many of them
from their homes and apartments into the
outside but still oppressive night air. On this
evening, Lee Minikus, a California Highway
Patrolman, stopped Marquette Frye, a young,
Black man, for speeding. Frye was administered a
sobriety test, a standard police procedure, and
failed. Minikus, a motorcycle officer, called for a
patrol car to take Marquette Frye to jail and for a
tow truck to remove his vehicle to the police
impound.9
The car's passenger, Ronald Frye, the driver's
brother, ran home to get his mother, who lived
two blocks away, to retrieve the car. By the time
Ronald Frye returned to the scene with his
mother the lights from the arriving patrol car
and tow truck had drawn a crowd of several
hundred spectators, many of whom had been in
the streets escaping the oppressive heat and
humidity. The crowd's presence encouraged
Marquette Frye to resist arrest. Frye sought
sympathy from the crowd, which was growing
in numbers and hostility toward the police. As
Marquette resisted, his mother jumped on the
back of one of the arresting officers tearing his
shirt. Frye's brother got into a scuffle with the
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191
police. In an attempt to subdue Marquette Frye
an officer swung a night stick at his shoulder,
missed and caused a minor laceration on his
forehead.
The confrontation with the Fryes lasted only
about eight minutes and involved the California
Highway Patrol (CHP), not the Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD). LAPD officers
arrived as the Fryes were being placed under
arrest, having been already subdued. Although a
great deal has been made in the aftermath of the
Watts riot of the poor relations between the
LAPD and the Black community, the simple fact
of the matter is that the Fryes were neither
stopped nor arrested by the LAPD but by the
CHP. Within two minutes of the arrival of the
LAPD, the CHP was already driving the Fryes
off for booking. Equally important, the
procedures used in arresting the Fryes, including
the sobriety test and the call for back up, were
standard police procedures not only for CHP but
for other law enforcement agencies (McCone
Commission, 1965: 11).10
The arrest of the Fryes was by some
perceptions not the factor precipitating the riot.
After the Fryes were arrested and driven off and
as all of the officers were vacating the scene,
someone in the crowd spat on one of the
officers. The officers in response stopped
withdrawing and two CHP officers waded into
the crowd and arrested a young woman whom
they believed had spat. Also arrested was a man
who was attempting, unsuccessfully at that
point, to incite the crowd to violence.
Only after false rumors characterizing the
arrest of the Fryes as particularly brutal, and only
after false allegations describing the arrested
woman as pregnant permeated through the Black
community did small groups begin to run up and
down the streets near the arrest scene stoning
automobiles driven by whites.
The crowd of rioters grew in number and so
too did its hostility toward passing vehicles
driven by whites. These were set on fire as their
occupants were being forced from them to be
beaten. The rioters broke into numerous groups
moving from street to street, pelting vehicles
with rocks, and moving from one intersection to
the next. As police broke up one group of
rioters, another would come along and take its
place.
Strange Science
Although there have been no lack of social
science theories to explain this riot or the Black
urban riots generally, these theories begin from
such an abstract level that the details of the
unfolding of a riot seem inconsequential to them.
Perhaps that is why so many of these theories
flourish simultaneously, each extracting those
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facets of behavior that lead to their own
confirmation. Jerome Skolnick, whose Politics of
Protest became the best known of the
contributions to the Eisenhower Commission,
saw the riots as being caused by social structure.
Neil Smelser, for example, saw collective
behavior often growing out of a dynamic linkage
between the ideology of participants and
changes in the social structure.11
The difficulty with all these theories, beyond
their abstractions and ensuing vague operationalizations, is that they remain unsusceptible to
what the distinguished philosopher of science
Karl Popper (1959) calls the test of prediction.
Moreover, in the highly charged atmosphere of
the Black urban riots and the policy stakes at
issue, it would take a Herculean emotional and
intellectual effort for any theorist to separate his
own policy aspirations from his theoretical
interpretation. Consequently, it is not surprising
that Jerome Skolnick, the author of a book
sympathetic to the protests and claims of those
seeking social change from the left end of the
political continuum, interprets the claims and
motivations of these rioters as they themselves
did. However, when it comes to the behavior of
prejudiced white Americans, Skolnick does not
assess their behavior as they claim it, but
interprets it as unconscious projections on the
larger social order resulting from distorted,
simplistic and irrational thinking. For one group,
protest is the result of injustice; for the other, it is
the result of an irrational mind set. We are left
with two distinct theoretical approaches to
violence; one for those whose ideology is shared
by most academicians and a different one for
those whose ideology we would routinely find
abhorrent. If this is science, it is strange science
indeed.12
In the same vein, should we be surprised that
both Davies and Gurr who come to collective
violence through the school of relative deprivation interpret the Black urban riots as resulting
from relative deprivation? Or should we be
surprised that David O. Sears, who promulgated
the theory of the New Urban Blacks to explain
the Watts riots (Sears and McConahay, 1973),
reiterates this theory a quarter of a century later
in discussing the Rodney King riots (Sears, 1994)
after it has been soundly refuted as simply a
statistical error, ensuing from confusing the
dependent and independent variables (Miller,
Bolce and Halligan, 1976: 334±345)? What is
missing in these post hoc searches for primary
causes is a concern with the management factors
that affected the riot process.
Secondary Causes
When we take a second look at this much
researched riot, it becomes clear that not all can
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December 2001
be explained by the motivations or social
structures that apparently characterize the
rioting population. The way in which the
situation was managed by the LAPD had an
escalating effect. The analysis reveals that prior
training was inapplicable, ideology rather than
training determined the response and police
were undermanned and under-equipped.
The first night's rioting was characterized by
mobile vandals engaged in a moveable feast of
violence and property damage, supported by
snipers intent on committing murder. The police
found that the crowd control tactics they had
been taught, which focused on containing and
dispersing a large mob, did not work against
amorphous, mobile clusters of marauders who
were roaming from street to street, throwing
rocks, uprooting benches and setting them
ablaze. Gunfire emerged from windows and
random shots were taken at police and firemen
who had been called to contain the fires. But the
police had no counter-sniper procedures.13
Sometime between three and four in the
morning, the riot subsided. Deputy Chief Roger
Murdock ordered the police to retreat. The
conventional wisdom of the time, which had
permeated police forces, was that a police
presence itself in the Black community was
sufficiently provocative for civil unrest. Murdock
decided that the ebbing riot would recede further
with the withdrawal of the police.
By dawn on August 12, 1965, the streets of
Watts were deserted and the police wrongly
concluded that the riot was over, that it had been
an episodic event. The police also had a false sense
of confidence because of the quality of life of the
Black community in Los Angeles. Watts was inner
city and Black, but it certainly was not poverty
stricken and it was most certainly not an urban
slum. It was a neighborhood of well-kept streets
and single family homes, nearly half owned by
their occupants. Los Angeles Blacks were better
off than those in any other major American city.
The next night, however, the riot returned
with the same hit-and-run tactics by small
groups of roving marauders, moving quickly
from street to street. The rioters that night had
grown in number to 7,000. Once again the
tactics in riot control in which the police had
been trained, proved useless. As then Police
Inspector Daryl Gates (1992: 96) described his
reaction to the chaos around him, `I didn't know
what the hell I was doing; worse, neither did
anyone else.' By 4:00 a.m. the streets of Watts
were once again quiet.
Efforts by community leaders to reason with
rioters had failed. Against the judgement of
commanders in the street, popular civil rights
activist Dick Gregory was permitted to go into
the crowd to plead for calm, requiring the
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THE LOS ANGELES RIOTS: A STUDY IN CRISIS PARALYSIS
numbered and needed elsewhere. Gregory
moved toward the rioters and was shot in the
leg. The decision to permit him on the scene is
viewed as a political decision running counter to
the legitimate tactical needs of the police.
Once again the sun rose on quiet streets and
the delusion that the riot was over rose with the
morning, but this time the rioters did not wait
until the cover of darkness. The working day
brought with it mass looting, with looters
pulling cars and trucks up to stores and gorging
themselves on whatever they could carry and
haul away. Undermanned, still unprepared, the
police stood by while the entire commercial area
of Watts was openly vandalized. By afternoon,
looting turned to burning and the riot spread
fifty city blocks to the north. Gates (1992)
believes that the inability of the police to stop
the rioting and looting encouraged the rioters.
The police were not only undermanned; they
were also under-equipped. When it was decided
that the police should drive in three car teams
with two cars containing four officers, each
holding a protruding shotgun out the window,
the police found they had an insufficient number
of shot guns to make the threat credible.
Shotguns had to be purchased by individual
officers and some shotguns were flown in from
other departments.
A discussion ensued in police ranks about
making mass arrests, a tactic previously not used.
The police still adhered to the notion that
vigorous police action would only inflame the
rioters and were reluctant to escalate their response. This reluctance was a consequence of the
poor relations between the police and the Black
community. Chief William Parker was concerned
that mass arrests would be perceived as an attack
on the Black community and further aggravate
poor police community relations, which many
perceived as consequence of over-zealous
policing of Black neighborhoods. Parker's initial
reaction thus seemed to be based more on
political considerations than tactical ones.
Parker finally relented after his deputies in the
field described the grim reality of the
deteriorating conditions they faced. Police would
now go out in convoys to defeat the rioters'
tactics of luring police from their cars while other
rioters tipped the cars over and set them ablaze.
Cars were replaced with buses filled with 25±30
officers. Mobile at-the-scene jails were set up so
that officers would not have to abandon their
posts to make arrests and book suspects. Los
Angeles Police were reinforced by the county
sheriff's office and the California National Guard.
Still improvisation was the name of the game
and not all tactical responses had been thought
out. To add to the poor decision making, the Lt.
Governor hesitated in calling up the National
Guard and their deployment was held in limbo
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for more than a day.14 The McCone Commission
(1965: 18) concluded that the prompt deployment of the National Guard, especially one unit
that was assembled in neighboring Long Beach
awaiting transport to summer camp, would have
turned the tide of battle much earlier. The
National Guard was not deployed until 1:00 p.m.
Friday, August 13, 1965. To stem the riot, it
took 13,900 Guardsmen plus more than 1,700
police. The riot started on a Wednesday evening. It took the police with the National Guard in
place until Saturday to turn the tide of battle and
order was not restored until the following
Tuesday.
Anyone looking at the day-to-day tactical
deployment of the police and other agents of
control cannot escape the obvious conclusion that
if mass arrests and sufficient mobilization could
have been brought to the scene, the Watts riot
would not have spread over fifty blocks nor
would it have lasted seven days. Both the training
and equipment given to the police ill-prepared
and ill-equipped them to deal with this riot.
Perhaps, most of all, the LAPD was a victim of the
same ideology that caused ruin in Detroit: the fear
that a strong, escalating police presence and mass
arrests would have inflamed the rioters instead of
bringing the riots to a conclusion. The lessons
from Watts were not put into practice on April
29, 1992, when Los Angeles once again exploded
in conflict; the errors simply were repeated.
The Rodney King Riot
On March 3, 1991, Rodney G. King, a twentyfive year old parolee, convicted of seconddegree armed robbery, driving with two male
companions, led California Highway Patrol
officers on a high-speed chase on the San
Fernando Valley freeway. King left the freeway,
ran four red lights and finally stopped the
vehicle. By then LAPD cruisers and police
helicopters had joined in the chase. An
intoxicated King initially resisted arrest, unlike
his companions, but was quickly brought to his
knees. Then while he was rolling on the ground,
police officers continued to beat him, kick him
and stomp on his head. King was struck fifty-six
times alone by police batons. By any measure,
this was an excessive use of force.
The entire incident was videotaped by an
amateur photographer who sold the tape to a
Los Angeles television station. King is a Black
man. The repeatedly televised incident outraged
the entire community. The Black community of
Los Angeles saw it as a vicious act that was
more than police brutality; it was racism.
Moreover, rather than seeing it as an isolated
incident, civil rights groups argued that the
video tape captured LAPD policy.
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On March 14, Police Sergeant Stacey Koon
and three police officers were indicted in the
King beating on felony charges of using
excessive force under color of law and assault
with a deadly weapon.15 They were tried in Simi
Valley, a white, middle-class suburb of Los
Angeles. Just after 3:00 p.m. on April 29, 1992,
the jury returned a not guilty verdict on the
felony charge of excessive force and failed to
reach a verdict on the lesser charge of filing a
false police report.16
Los Angeles erupted in violence. If the police
and city government had learned anything about
crisis preparation and management from the
events of 1965, it certainly was not evident in
the lack of preparations for the predictable riot. It
was as if 1965 had never occurred. The city plans
for an emergency were not only inadequate; they
failed to designate responsibility. More startling,
`[t]here appears to be no specific EOO
(Emergency Operations Organization) planning
for the possibility of unrest following the King
verdict' (Webster Commission, 1992: 80). The
Webster Commission, a blue ribbon commission
chaired by former FBI Director William Webster,
also found that the emergency training that
existed within the EOO was directed at
earthquakes, natural and accidental disasters.
There was no EOO training to deal with the
probable outcomes of the Rodney King verdict
(Webster Commission, 1992: 94).17
When the verdict was announced, most of
LAPD's 1000 detectives were at home (Petersilia
and Abrahamse, 1994). Mayor Thomas Bradley,
himself a Black man, had objected to any kind of
police presence while awaiting the verdict,
fearing this would be provocative (Wilson,
1998). Clearly, Bradley had learned nothing
from the failure of the police to respond swiftly,
decisively and with proper resources in the 1965
Watts riots. The same mentality that had caused
the Watts riot to grow now caused the Rodney
King riots to escalate.
At 5:30 p.m. violence and looting broke out at
the intersection of Florence and Normandie. The
police were videotaped fleeing from the rioters.
One officer grabbed a loudspeaker and yelled to
his men to flee: `It's not worth it, it's not worth
it, let's get out of here' (McMillian, 1992: A4). It
is at this abandoned corner that a white truck
driver was pulled from his cab and mercilessly
beaten and left unconscious, an event that was
videotaped by a news helicopter.
Where's the Chief?
Police Chief Daryl Gates, who had advocated
mass arrests and escalation of the police response
during the 1965 Watts riots, showed a very
different reaction to the Rodney King riots. As
the riot progressed, Gates remained at a police
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December 2001
fund raiser. Subsequently, Gates returned to his
office without taking charge of his officers or
issuing a tactical alert (Wilson, 1998: 34). Gates'
absence during the critical early stages of the riot
to attend a political rally in Brentwood and to
take a two hour helicopter ride after he returned,
as the riot was heating up, is appropriately
termed `mystifying' by the Webster Commission
(1992: 109). Gates' absence created a vacuum in
final decision making authority and centralized
control as the LAPD became not one police
department but many, operating without overall
command. Gates is harshly criticized by the
Webster Commission for bad management
decisions. These included the replacement of
seasoned officers with new ones in two critical
areas just weeks before the King verdict.18
As Gates attended the reception, Mayor
Bradley ordered police officers to a street corner
where motorists were being pulled from cars
(Hiscock, 1992: 9). But the Special Weapons and
Tactics Team (SWAT) was not deployed, the
armored personnel carriers designed specifically
to deal with this kind of disorder were not
mobilized and police officers were denied
permission to use tear gas and rubber bullets
to disperse the crowd. Several officers were
instructed not to arrest rioters (Wilson, 1998:
34); offers of assistance from the sheriff's office
and the California Highway patrol were not put
to good use.
In the South Bureau, where the rioting was at
its worst, a field command post was established
but it was unclear if anyone had taken command.
The Webster Commission (1992: 109) describes
the command post as a `black hole' into which
police officers from all over the city were placed,
but where only a few were actually deployed.
When Chief Gates arrived at South Bureau's field
command sometime between 10:00 and 11:00
p.m., he found that there was both a lack of
deployment of officers and a failure on the part
of Deputy Chief Hunt to implement a containment strategy, a normal procedure in both
riot situations and other incidents such as
hostage and barricade situations. Gates
reprimanded Hunt for these failures, but Gates
himself stayed less than hour.
At the 77th Street Area, another critical zone,
it was also unclear who was in charge in the field
command post. It had taken more than three
hours after the verdict for the post to be
established. Even the Department's own analysis
of the response in the 77th was incapable of
determining when command was taken. The
important Tactical Alert was never issued from
the 77th. Eighteen sectors that comprise the Los
Angeles police force were functioning as 18
separate police departments, without department-wide command and control (Webster
Commission, 1992: 110). The vital centralized
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command and control necessary for an appropriate field response was absent.
The explanation for absent leadership is most
likely to be found in what happened to Gates
since the Rodney King indictment. Gates might
have been chief on April 29, 1992, but judging
from events, he appeared to be chief in name
only. He was clearly a lame duck chief, with his
announced resignation already known. He
quickly became the Mayor's and police commission's scapegoat for the Rodney King episode,
both trying zealously to remove him from office.
The police commission, in a secret and probably
unlawful proceeding, suspended Gates after the
King episode for a period of sixty days.19
The Christopher Commission, under former
United States Secretary of State Warren
Christopher, investigated the King beating (not
the riot). The Commission's report further
attacked Gates' role as chief. It stands to reason
that with less than two months to serve and
already having been made the scapegoat for one
part of the Rodney King episode, Gates was not
about to offer himself up for a second execution.
The police response to the Rodney King episode
is totally at variance with Gates' philosophy and
is probably less a consequence of his inaction
than his inability to act.
Some have speculated that the hands-off
response was a consequence of not wanting to
further provoke the mob, as it was in Watts in
1965. Police, according to some observers, did
not want to have transmitted over live television
mass arrests of black youths, thrown down on
the ground and handcuffed. Whether these
speculations are correct is difficult to say, but
there is no difficulty in pointing out that the
overwhelming media characterization, both print
and video, is that the police did little to prevent
the riots from escalating. As fires raged through
more than 150 properties, one television anchor
woman exclaimed, `I can't believe the cops are
looking at this and not doing something' (Lacey
and Humbler, 1992: A1). When local television
showed the absence of any police activity at the
site where young Blacks pulled a white truck
driver from his cab and beat him unconscious,
the LAPD Cdr. Robert Gil declared that the
police were reorganizing (Stewart and El Nasser,
1992: 3A). According to the Los Angeles Times, it
was four hours into the riot before off duty
officers were called to return to their posts (this,
however, was faster than in 1965).
Just over six hours into the riot, the National
Guard was called up and on its way to Los
Angeles. By 11:00 p.m., the riot was abating, but
sporadic and significant violence, looting and
burning continued in the Black neighborhoods
for yet another two days. The smoke from the
riots was so intense that Los Angeles
International Airport had to be closed. By the
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195
morning of April 30, 1992, the tenor of
deployment was changing. All 8,000 of LAPD's
officers were deployed with orders to make
arrests for the most serious crimes: 1,417 arrests
were made that day (Petersilia and Abrahamse,
1994). Even so, glitches occurred. The 2000
National Guard troops remained idle in their
barracks due to a communications command
breakdown and a shortage of supplies. Short of
ammunition, the Guard was, nonetheless,
deployed. By 9:00 p.m., the next day, 24 hours
after Governor Wilson activated them, 1,007
Guardsmen were on patrol with another 1,999
still waiting to receive their assignments from
local officials (Weintraub, 1992: A12).
Despite the police and National Guard
deployment, the riots intensified on the second
night. Firefighters and paramedics came under
sniper fire. Police officers escorted firefighters to
the scene and the fires abated, but the police
were still attempting to control looters. In great
numbers, looters descended on stores, some
carrying their children with them. As in the
1960s, when the police intervened, the looters
stopped and when the police moved on, the
looters returned. Outraged by the continuing
lawlessness, President George Bush on May 1,
1992 ordered Army and Marine troops into L.A.
along with some 1,000 federal agents trained in
riot control. National Guard and federal troops
patrolled streets in the Black community with
bayonets fixed. The National Guard came under
federal authority. The death toll rose to 38 with
more than 1,200 injured, 3,000 arrested, 1,500
buildings set ablaze and $500 million in property
damage.
On May 2, the rioting waned. The next day
the schools reopened as the Courts processed
9,413 arrests. On May 4, Stanley Sheinbaum,
President of the Los Angeles Police Commission,
called for an investigation into why the police
took so long to react to the initial disorders,
further underscoring what media observers of
the riots had concluded.
Observations and Conclusions
The two L.A. riots show very little by way of
crisis management, preparation or learning.
Despite the fact that the riots had become part
of the American scene of the 1960s, the outbreak
of violence in Watts caught the LAPD
unprepared. Preparation itself would have been
a political statement and a recognition that Los
Angeles, while not Newark or Detroit, and
certainly not the deep South, had a potential
problem of racial violence. Instead of preparing
or responding appropriately, the police in 1965
fell back on the false comfort of the relatively
high status Blacks in Los Angeles had achieved.
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Once the riots started the decision making
focused less on police procedure than on
constituency perception. Mass arrests were
resisted until the bitter end, because it was
deemed a policy that might inflame the rioters
and, of course, the Black community.
In the span of time between the Watts riots
and the Rodney King riots the Los Angeles
police department had acquired better equipment
to deal with riots, including armored personnel
carriers and non-lethal weapons. Nonetheless,
the long standing, volatile political conflict
between Police Chief Daryl Gates, who in
1965 had been an advocate of strong and
decisive measures to deal with the riots, and
Mayor Thomas Bradley appears to have had a
decisive impact on Gates' inaction during the
riots.
We find Mayor Bradley, an elected official,
making police decisions because there is a power
vacuum in the police department. Until the call
up of the National Guard, we find that decision
making, from whatever quarter it emanated,
required the police to take a hands off approach
to the riots, an approach that disproportionately
affected Los Angeles' Korean minority. This
group owned and operated small businesses in
and near the Black community and their stores,
like other commercial establishments, were
targets of the looting and burning. Many of
these small, undercapitalized businesses were
wiped out in the riots. In some families, an entire
generation's work went up in flames and the
Korean community was so offended by the lack
of police response to protect it that its conationals in Korea responded by rioting against
American military bases in Korea.20
In other research (Miller and Schaen, 2000),
Emily Schaen and I have argued that democracy
itself with its competing interest groups and
various constituencies limits crisis management
and preparation. The more politicized the issues,
the less likely tactical, objective decisions are
going to be made. Because of the racial character
of the two Los Angeles riots, such observations
might be less palatable than they should be.21
Irrespective of what the underlying political
ingredient is, whether race or business interest,
the execution of crisis responses in democracy is
a political and not an objective decision (Miller,
1999).
The police conduct during the Rodney King
riots is mystifying. Not only was the potential
impact of the Simi Valley verdict ignored, but
even after it was rendered, the police and the
city administration, which is also responsible for
emergency response, failed dramatically to
respond to the developing crisis. If anything
had been learned from the Watts riot, it should
have been that police operations and control had
to be mobilized and implemented quickly to
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December 2001
provide the show of force necessary to prevent
escalation. Official LAPD doctrine itself calls for
such a show of force. Yet, instead of a decisive
centralized mobilization, the LAPD and city
officials are most appropriately characterized as
hesitant, reluctant, confused, indecisive and
lacking in any conviction to take action.
The situation at the 77th dramatically underscores this. While the rest of the city watched
the escalating and sometimes brutal violence at
the intersection of Florence and Normandie, an
intersection within the 77th's jurisdiction and
from which its officers fled, the officers did not
regroup and return in force. By midnight as
many as 1,790 officers were sent to assist at the
77th area. These were held in a bus yard without
deployment. The consequences of this decision
were far reaching; for not only were these
officers unavailable to the 77th area, they had
been drained from other sectors and these were
undermanned while their manpower languished
awaiting deployment.
At every level of management, from lacking a
decisive mobilized response that anticipated
disorder to police commanders not taking
charge, to eighteen sectors functioning not as
one centralized department conscious of
economies of force and able to communicate
with one another, the LAPD was wanting in
managing the crisis. While there was no
conspiracy to teach the people of L.A. a lesson
for their criticism of the police (as has been
rumored in the community), the continued and
repeated failures of basic elements of police work
cannot be easily dismissed as incompetence.
Rather, the race issue in America has become so
highly charged and politicized that careers at all
levels of government can be made or broken by
offending powerful ethnic groups capable of
mobilizing their interests. In such a situation,
decisive action might have been a career decision
few wanted to take. Certainly, Chief Gates, the
advocate of decisive action in Watts nearly
thirty years earlier, was unwilling to take such
action. Gates' subsequent explanations of his
actions since the riots are no less mystifying and
incredible than were his actions in the absence of
explanation. It might well be that no one wanted
to be responsible for the televised picture of
masses of handcuffed Black youths.
The 1992 L.A. riot is a study of police
paralysis. To paraphrase the insights of Tony
who rioted in the Battle of London's Trafalgar
Square, the rioters did it because they could. As
the Webster Commission (1992: 122) argued, the
hesitant police response communicated an
unintended but explosive message: come out
into the streets and vent your anger. We won't
stop you. That is probably the best explanation
rendered of the Los Angeles riot of April 29,
1992.
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Notes
1. This article was published as a chapter in
Rosenthal, Boin and Comfort (2001), Managing
Crises: Threats, Dilemmas, Opportunities, published
by Charles C, Thomas Publishers, Springfield,
Illinois.
2. The author expresses his gratitude to Emily
Schaen, a political science doctoral student at the
University of Cincinnati, who contributed to this
research and assisted in the preparation of the
bibliography.
3. Relative deprivation theorists draw heavily on
the work of psychologist John Dollard (1939)
who proposed that under certain conditions
frustration produces aggression, an observation
that is frequently referred to as the `frustrationaggression hypothesis.' Relative deprivation is
perceived to be a form of frustration.
4. For a refutation of Davies' application of relative
deprivation to the Black urban riots, see Miller,
Bolce and Halligan (1977).
5. In an outstanding piece of research, Brush (1996)
documents the rise and fall of relative
deprivation theory, showing that by the 1980s
there were far and away more negative citations
to the theory in the social science literature than
positive ones.
6. Surprisingly, however, Gurr, the primary mover
behind relative deprivation theory, made no
attempt to go public with his conclusion. Indeed
in a phone conversation with Stephen Brush
(1996) on December 18, 1992, Gurr noted how
Muller's 1972 work showed that other factors
were far more important than relative
deprivation in explaining the Black urban riots.
7. My thinking about primary causes is strikingly
similar to that of Boin and Van Duin's (1995)
work on prison riots. As they point out, the
focus on rioters is only a small component of the
study of riots. Focusing exclusively on prisoners
ignores the managers, the keepers of the prison,
and most important what decisions they make
during a riot. Strikingly Janowitz's analysis runs
parallel to Boin and Van Duin's emphasis on
`preparedness' as an issue in crisis management,
and his concern with the impact of management
on reestablishing order runs parallel to Boin and
Van Duin's emphasis on the `aftermath' period
where authorities bring the prison system back
to normal.
8. A finding born out in the evolution of the Los
Angeles riots of 1992 when the looting phase
began in earnest and Hispanics and whites
entered the riot.
9. The description of the 1965 Watts riot is a
composite from the following sources: Kerner
Commission (1968); Governor's Commission
(McCone Commission, 1965); Gates (1992);
Cohen and Murphy (1966).
10. The distinction between the LAPD and the CHP
is not a hair split. The Black community's
animosity toward the LAPD did not generally
spill over to other departments (McCone
Commission, 1965: 28).
11. For a heated debate of the differences between
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12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
197
these theorists over the riots, see Skolnick and
Currie (1972) and Smelser (1972).
Any social scientist remotely familiar with the
work of Adorno et al. (1950) on the concept of
the `authoritarian personality' will recall that
authoritarians almost uniformly came from the
right end of the political scale and almost never
from the left. While Adorno's methodology
easily captured fascism as an authoritarian mind
set, even the most doctrinaire communist would
not be so easily labeled.
The initial anti-sniper countermeasures would
have put the police across from one another
making them vulnerable to friendly fire from
their colleagues.
The Lt. Governor hesitated to call up the
National Guard, refusing to leave a trustees
meeting at the University of California, Berkeley.
One possible explanation for this is that the
National Guard itself was neither trained nor
equipped to deal with riots, usually being called
up to perform rescue work and disaster relief.
There was always fear that the National Guard
would be too quick to use force and taking
responsibility for that possibility does not rest
easy with politicians. (Detroit serves as a telling
example of the problems in making policemen
out of the National Guard, which inflicted
unnecessary violence on the Black community
of that city.)
Koon and one of the patrolmen were also
indicted for filing false police reports of the
incident.
Given what the public saw on the tape as aired
on the major television networks, the Simi
Valley decision appears unbelievable, if not
simply racist. Yet, there is another explanation.
In conversations I have had with Washington
journalist and media watchdog Reed Irvine, he
told me that the tape aired on television was
significantly edited and thus different from the
one the Simi Valley jury saw. The jury saw a
seemingly subdued Rodney King get up and
charge the police before the worst of the
beatings took place. Irvine exhorted the
networks to play the same tape the jury saw
and offered to provide free copies. His offer was
ignored.
Although riots were not a certainty as a
consequence of the Simi Valley verdict, they
were a highly likely outcome, obvious to the
most casual observer of race relations in
America. In fact, a continent away in
Washington, D.C., a predominantly Black city,
some business planned to close and send their
employees home if the verdict came back in
favor of the police. After all, similar
circumstances had produced riots in other
American communities.
In a lecture at the University of California, Los
Angeles on April 14, 1999, former Chief Gates
explained the lack of preparedness for the riot by
noting that community leaders informed the
police that no riot was going to take place (Belie,
1999: 1, 10). How the community leaders could
have predicted this or why Gates would have
believed them seems beyond comprehension,
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JOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT
especially given Gates active role in dealing with
Watts.
19. These events are discussed at length in Gates
(1992: 315±356) and Webster and Williams
(1992: 102±109).
20 For an discussion of the impact of the riots on
the Korean-American community of Los
Angeles, see Ableman and Lie (1995).
21. Although largely a Black urban riot, once the
looting started members of all races participated
in the looting. Still, this arguable appears to be a
Black riot, albeit not exclusively so as in 1965.
Arrest records show that more Hispanics than
Blacks were arrested in the riot. This raises
profound questions. There is the obvious
question of the quality of arrest record data as
a representative picture of riot participants, a
methodological issue overwhelmingly familiar to
students of riots. But if the arrest records are
remotely accurate, it says that over time a riot
can become something very different from what
it was originally.
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