During the volatile early days of the racial justice protests in 2020, city officials in Los Angeles at first resisted calling for National Guard assistance before deciding that troops were needed to control crowds.
The Guard troops, arriving in Humvees with combat gear, acted as a supplement to the local police, providing security at shopping centers and at City Hall. Still, their presence met with public resistance in a city that has a history of high-profile confrontations between protesters and the police. In the aftermath of the 2020 response, the nonprofit National Police Foundation warned that future National Guard deployments in Los Angeles should come with coordinated messaging before, during and afterward “to avoid them being seen as an occupying force.”
Yet as protests returned to the city over the weekend in response to a series of federal immigration raids, there has been no coordinated messaging or even agreement about the deployment of the National Guard. President Trump ordered the troops into Los Angeles, even as state and local politicians warned that doing so would inflame tensions rather than ease them.
“This is exactly what Donald Trump wanted,” Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said on Monday, announcing that the state would sue the Trump administration over the deployment.
When and how to use the National Guard were among the many lessons from raucous demonstrations over policing that broke out across the country in 2020 in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd. Many after-action reports and independent reviews blamed police departments for mishandling protests, citing insufficient training and militarized responses that made tense situations worse.
Some police departments, such as the one in Raleigh, N.C., were found to have used pepper spray indiscriminately. Denver officers were found to have inappropriately used weapons such as tear gas and pepper-spray balls against people who were yelling about officer behavior but not involved in any physical resistance. Officers in Portland, Ore., where protests persisted for months, used force more than 6,000 times — and a federal review found that some uses were contrary to what is allowed under policy guidelines, such as when officers used a weapon against someone because that person had engaged in “furtive conversation.”
In some cities, departments have provided further training for officers to prepare them for such events. Others are still honing policies around the use of crowd-control weapons.
But Los Angeles is now facing a real-world test of its policing strategies, one that may have been somewhat sidetracked by Mr. Trump’s decision to send in the National Guard when state and local officials had not asked for help.
After the 2020 demonstrations, after-action reports criticized the Los Angeles Police Department for having used what analysts described as antiquated tactics.
One analysis found that Los Angeles officers had illegally detained some people for hours without water or access to bathrooms. Another noted that officers had lacked adequate training in the use of some potentially dangerous weapons and gear that should be operated only by highly skilled individuals to ensure that they do not accidentally hit nearby bystanders.
In 2021, California approved legislation to limit the use of projectiles and chemicals to disperse protest crowds. The rules require officers to prioritize de-escalation. They also prohibit officers from aiming projectiles at people’s heads, and say that they should minimize the chance of injuries to bystanders.
But Carol Sobel, a civil rights lawyer who has worked on protest-related cases in Los Angeles over many years, said that despite the legislation, the legal rulings in lawsuits against the department and the calls for reform, there was not much evidence of progress. In recent days, she said, she has once again watched what appeared to be indiscriminate use of less-lethal weapons, such as sponge-tipped projectiles, and other violations of policy.
“I don’t really see a practical change,” she said.
Over the weekend, some journalists reported being struck by projectiles fired by the police. A video shows one officer in Los Angeles turning a weapon toward a television journalist before shooting her in the leg with a projectile.
In a statement on Monday, the Los Angeles Police Department said officers had encountered “significant acts of violence, vandalism and looting,” and the department reported using more than 600 rounds of less-lethal munitions.
The department said its professional standards bureau would investigate allegations of excessive force.
