Riot Control
Kevin J. Mullen
When news of
Criticism was swift in coming. “Civil and police authorities,” said one observer, “despite all pious talk . . . about how prepared the city was to handle any situation that developed, proved themselves criminally lacking in foresight and totally unprepared to handle the situation that developed.” District Attorney Edmund “Pat” Brown hurriedly announced a grand jury inquiry to find out what had gone wrong and who was responsible. “The past is the past,” said the deputy police chief, “and if the police have made mistakes the thing to do is admit it.”
But nobody admitted much of anything. In the post-war euphoria which followed, the whole embarrassing matter was quickly forgotten. The grand jury investigation led nowhere, and the police administration returned to its regular routine. The bosses skated on that one.
There is an oft-repeated maxim that military generals tend to fight the last war. Adapted to the San Francisco Police Department, it might be said that the bosses tend to forget the last riot. By the 1960s the department was faced with a new set of crowd problems and the hard-won lessons of 1945 were apparently forgotten, for in the early stages of that disorderly decade the department again came under criticism for having been caught with its crowd-control pants down. As the decade progressed, and the department was faced with a seemingly endless series of demonstrations, parades, and disorders, a set of techniques and a certain level of expertise in dealing with crowd problems evolved.
In the 1970s as the civil rights movement took a different turn and the anti-war movement wound down, the attention of the department was diverted away from crowd control problems and toward concerns about street crime; many veterans of the street conflicts of the 1960s retired or moved on to other duties. By the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s the department again came under fire for its handling of disorders, most notably the White Night Riot in May 1979 and the “celebration” following the Super Bowl victory in 1982.
In the aftermath of those events, a long hard look was taken at the dynamics of different types of crowds and a set of procedures was developed. More importantly, a philosophy was adopted which addressed how to peaceably “manage” crowds, rather than merely control them by the application of force. The philosophy and those procedures were committed to writing so that later generations of police administrators would not have to learn the same lessons the hard way. Again the wheel turned and those familiar at first hand with the issues moved on to other pursuits.
And again, it seemed that the lessons of the past were forgotten. Once more the department was criticized for failure to deal appropriately with public events, first with the 1988 demonstration at the St. Francis Hotel at which Dolores Huerta was severely injured and later at the October [1989] “sweep” in the Castro following the arrest of a number of Act-Up Demonstrators.[i][1]
