The Los Angeles Police Department severely mishandled protests last summer in the wake of George Floyd’s death, illegally detaining protesters, giving conflicting orders to its rank-and-file officers and striking people who had committed no crimes with rubber bullets, bean bags or batons, according to a new report released on Thursday.
The department was not prepared for the protests to become violent despite similar turns in other cities, the 101-page report commissioned by the City Council said, and once officers were confronted with the violence, they quickly lost control, failing to rein in much of the most destructive behavior while arresting protesters for minor offenses.
The review of the L.A.P.D. is the latest to find serious fault with a police department’s response to the wave of protests that swept the country in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death on May 25, and it comes as the officer whose actions set off the unrest, Derek Chauvin, goes on trial in Minneapolis.
The report was also highly critical of the department’s leadership, saying that high-ranking officers sometimes made chaotic scenes even worse by shifting strategies without communicating. In many cases, officers used “antiquated tactics” that failed to calm the more violent demonstrators.
Undercover officers who infiltrated the protests had no way to report criminal behavior directly to supervisors and sometimes had to be rescued from the devolving crowd, the report said, adding that the department’s intelligence operations have become less effective as positions in that field were cut in favor of patrol units.
And while officers arrested thousands of people during the protests in late May, there was no clear plan for how to detain and process them, according to the report. In many cases, the police wrongly arrested protesters under a law that did not allow them to take the people into custody. Some protesters were injured so severely by “less lethal” munitions that they had to get surgery. The L.A.P.D. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
The review is one of three that has been investigating the L.A.P.D. response to the demonstrations, and it was completed by a panel of former police commanders and led by Gerald Chaleff, a veteran Los Angeles attorney who has served on police oversight panels in Los Angeles dating back to the city’s 1992 riots.
“There was a lack of preparation, a lack of planning,” Mr. Chaleff said of the L.A.P.D. in an interview, adding that the department “could have minimized” the destruction caused by a small group of people who stole from stores and vandalized the city during the protests.
He said most members of the protests were peaceful, but that “there were some people there to create chaos and cause problems.”
Mr. Chaleff, who once served as the L.A.P.D.’s special assistant for constitutional policing under former Chief William J. Bratton, noted that the report was primarily concerned with the department’s institutional response, not with any particular incident of police misconduct, a sign that the police had “allowed less violence” than in the past.
“I think there’s been progress,” he said. “But you have to be prepared for what’s coming, and you have to have the elected and appointed leadership that understands what is required and creates a culture for the kinds of responses that are necessary.”
Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.