A deputy chief told the inspector general that the department expected a “few hundred protesters, but instead there were 30,000.” The report paints a picture of an agency that was unprepared for the scale of the unrest. You had thousands of CPD members out on the street without adequate directions or supervision or policy guidance and equipment,” Deborah Witzburg, deputy inspector general for public safety told the Chicago Tribune. “The bottom line here is that the leadership of the department failed, and in doing so they endangered members of the public and hung the members of the department out to dry. Major critical reports have been released on the response of the Chicago Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department.Ī report by the Inspector General for the City of Chicago calls to task the city and police department’s leadership for a confused and uncoordinated response to the protests and riots that endangered the protesters and the police. Many of the cases were quickly dismissed, which may explain why 52% of the reporting agencies said they arrested the same people twice for “protest-related crimes.”Īfter the mess that was 2020, it’s expected that law enforcement agencies will be heavily criticized in after-action reports. Nearly 17% of these arrests were for felonies and 7% of the total involved violence. MCCA member agencies arrested 16,241 protesters and rioters from May 25 to July 31. “More than three quarters of agencies (78%) discovered persons that seemed to self-identify with far left ideologies, and more than half (51%) discovered persons that seemed to identify with violent far-right ideologies,” the report says. The report says that violent extremists collaborated online and through social media to organize violence. The peak of the violence, according to MCCA, came during the first weekend of the protests, May 29 through June 1. One agency reported that four of their officers were shot by rioters. A little more than half of reporting jurisdictions said they had encountered firearms during the protests and riots. MCCA reports that some rioters used the tactic of throwing firebombs behind the officers so that they could be trapped between barriers built by the mob and the flames. Nearly half of the respondents said rioters had used incendiary devices.
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Officers were also commonly assaulted with commercial fireworks, impact weapons, and lasers targeting their eyes.
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The report says violent protesters often used a front line of peaceful protesters as human shields while they assaulted officers with thrown objects. The most common weapon used by the rioters against officers in the reporting cities and counties were thrown projectiles, including rocks, bricks, glass bottles, and frozen water bottles.
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More than 2,035 law enforcement officers were injured at the protests and riots during the time frame studied. The 68 cities and counties reported that they experienced 2,385 incidents of looting and 624 incidents of arson, including 97 police vehicles burned. Looting and arson were common during the period studied. One city accounted for 100 of these riots. MCCA reports that 574 of the protests it studied involved violence. Some of these protests may have also involved violence. Eight of the reporting cities-Columbus, Denver, Detroit, Memphis, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and Tucson-said that every protest during the May 25 to July 31 period involved unlawful but non-violent acts. Five hundred of these occurred in a single city. Of the 8,700 protest events reported by MCCA members, 3,692 involved unlawful acts of civil disobedience.