Police Chiefs to Tell Senators That Riots Can Be Dealt With

Three police chiefs whose cities were marred by holiday riots will tell a legislative panel that such disturbances can be dealt with more effectively if local and state authorities are willing to pay for it.

The chiefs of police in Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and Palm Springs were interviewed Monday in advance of Thursday’s hearing of the state Senate Committee on Local Government, which will hold a special one-day hearing to see what can be done to avoid similar disturbances. The session, prompted by the Aug. 31 beach riot in Huntington Beach, will be held in that city.

Although mutual aid agreements allow their departments to call on other cities for assistance during a riot, the chiefs said that added manpower may not be enough. Effective use of such reinforcements is often as important, or even more so, than their sheer numbers.

Lack of Coordination

“One of the concerns,” Chief Arb Campbell of Newport Beach said of mutual aid requests, “is that officers from other departments are coming into your city in a heated situation. There can be a lack of coordination of those as well as your personnel to control it.”

A remedy, Campbell says, is to once again establish--through training--uniform procedures for crowd control, as was done during the anti-war protests and campus riots of the 1960s and 1970s.

“I feel what’s needed now is for the cities in this county to be provided with training so that when you get into a mutual aid situation, all understand how to control those personnel (and) everybody behaves in a like manner,” Campbell said. “The state could be of assistance in providing funds for that training.”

There were riots by young people in Palm Springs during Easter vacation, in Newport Beach on the Fourth of July and most recently at a professional surfing contest in Huntington Beach over the Labor Day weekend.

Manpower Packing

“In all three situations, the lacking element was manpower,” Campbell said. “You can’t increase the number of officers you have, so you have to rely on mutual aid. And that goes right back to the need for training so everybody acts in a like manner.”

In addition to updated training programs, Chief Earle Robitaille of Huntington Beach said he would also like to see law enforcement’s intelligence capabilities improved statewide.

“The problem is trying to anticipate something like that happening,” Robitaille said. “If there was the intelligence available, it might be avoided.”

Robitaille, who was on vacation when some of the thousands of spectators gathered for the Op Pro Surfing Championships got into a pitched battle with his officers, said Monday that he is still gathering and assessing information for his presentation to the hearing before the Senate committee, which is chaired by Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach.)

One area his investigators are looking at, Robitaille said, is whether some of the same people involved in the Huntington Beach riot were also at Palm Springs, Newport Beach or last weekend’s Street Scene in Los Angeles, where at least one person was killed during two nights of disturbances.

Earlier, officers in Huntington Beach and Palm Springs said they could find no evidence that the same people were involved in the disturbances in the two cities.

Robitaille admitted that there has been a history of problems associated with the annual surfing contest but that “it’s never been the surfing part that caused them. It’s usually the beauty contest” that is staged in conjunction with it.

This summer’s disturbance began when thousands of people were on the beach. About 20,000 were watching the surfing championships, but as many as 100,000 people may have been on the beach, police believe. The trouble started behind the surfing bleachers and quickly moved down the beach, away from where the surf competition was concluding. At one point, a small group of officers was trapped inside a two-story lifeguard building. After most were able to leave the structure, a large and rowdy crowd surrounded the building and turned over and burned six lifeguard and police vehicles.

Police reinforcements were summoned, and about an hour later about 150 officers from throughout the county cleared the beach and a section of the Pacific Coast Highway. Some beachgoers felt that officers acted too vigorously, and several lodged complaints of police brutality.

22 Arrests Made

By nightfall, 10 police officers and 30 beachgoers had been injured. Police have so far arrested 22 people.

Since a riot forced Huntington Beach’s annual free Fourth of July fireworks show to be moved several years ago from the beach to the high school, “we’ve never experienced any problems,” Robitaille said. “But how do you move the surfing contest off the beach?”

Beyond any assistance the state might be able to provide, Robitaille said, the city could help itself by re-establishing its special events committee, which in the past reviewed plans for such gatherings as parades and festivals.

“I think it’s time once again for that kind of oversight,” he said.

Robitaille said his department occasionally has voiced reservations about the staging of certain events. “We often get voted down. Of course, we know there is a 50-50 chance in every one of those events that we’re going to get damned over it. If it goes wrong, 50% of the time we’re the ones who are going to be wrong. But that’s just part of the job.”

Preparing for Next Year

Also appearing at Thursday’s hearing, along with officials from several state law enforcement agencies, will be Chief Thomas Kendra of Palm Springs, where the first of the year’s riots erupted last March.

“It’s just a matter of manpower and the cost of providing additional personnel to control that kind of crowd,” said Kendra, who added that he has already prepared for next year by contracting with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department and California Highway Patrol for reinforcements.

There is a provision under mutual aid legislation that provides money for cities to offset the cost of calling in additional officers, Kendra said. “Unfortunately it hasn’t been funded,” he said.

The legislative hearing will be at 10 a.m. in the Huntington Beach City Council chambers.

Another panel, the special Huntington Beach commission that was given the task of conducting a local investigation into the riot, will meet for the second, and possibly final time, at 3:30 p.m. today in room B-8 of City Hall, 2000 Main St.