Riot Found Police in Disarray : Officers Kept From Flash Point Despite Pleas : Law enforcement: Lieutenant in charge says, ‘With what we had initially we performed a miracle.’ Most LAPD patrol captains were at Oxnard seminar.

In the first hours of last week’s bloody unrest, thousands of pleas for help by Los Angeles residents poured into police dispatchers, but the field commander at the riot’s flash point kept officers away from the area, ordering them to wait at a command post as the violence careened out of control.

A recording of Los Angeles Police Department radio transmissions obtained by The Times, along with interviews with police and fire officials, paint a picture of chaos and indecision by police commanders, who felt overmatched and seemed unprepared to deal with the crisis that some feared would erupt after the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case.

No less than nine times within a two-hour span, according to radio transmissions, field commander Lt. Mike Moulin of the 77th Street Division, or a subordinate, ordered police cars out of the area or to ignore operators trying to dispatch officers to the riot scenes.

In his first interview on his role in the riots, Moulin strongly defended his decision to hang back while bands of rioters brutally assaulted motorists and stormed stores.

“I didn’t want them killed,” he said of the officers under his command. “It’s really that simple. And I didn’t want the incident to escalate. And I didn’t want to go into that area without sufficient forces.”

Moulin said the criticism of the police response to the riots is “absolutely unfounded.” Noting that officers had rescued some citizens from rioters, he said: “With what we had initially, we performed a miracle. That’s what we did. A miracle.”

Additional questions about the performance during the worst U.S. riot in this century also arose Tuesday:

* The Times learned that two-thirds of the department’s 18 patrol captains were attending a training seminar in Oxnard on the day of the verdicts in the King case.

* The department did not mount a full-scale mobilization of its officers until 8 p.m.--more than two hours into the riot, a police source said. By then, unrest had spread throughout the city as numerous buildings were set afire and countless stores were looted.

* Angry city fire officials disputed Police Chief Daryl F. Gates’ contention that the police response to crimes committed during the riots was delayed partially because police had to protect firefighters. Fire officials said that in fact they got only limited protection during the first hours of the riot, even though large numbers of officers were kept waiting at a command post at 54th and Arlington streets.

Police commissioners said Tuesday that they have been deluged with complaints about the police handling of the riot. The civilian oversight panel has begun gathering material for a detailed examination of what one member called the LAPD’s “breakdown in decision-making” when the disturbance broke out.

Commissioner Ann Reiss Lane said the lapse continued into the riot’s second day Thursday, when looters were freely wandering large areas of the city, cleaning out shops. But she said, “It’s not clear to me at what level it broke down.”

One deputy chief said of the department’s actions as the riot gathered momentum: “This is alien to everything we’re supposed to do in a situation like this. Officers were furious.”

One officer at the command post described the night’s chaotic events as “the LAPD’s Vietnam.”

There was a “complete breakdown” of the command leadership, said the officer, who requested anonymity.

He described the scene at the command post as surreal, saying scores of officers--perhaps as many as 200, many of them angry and frustrated--stood around waiting for orders as the riot raged.

Everything projected indecision, the officer said. Word would come down to get ready, that officers were going to retake sectors of the city. Then the orders would be canceled and officers told to standby for another plan.

It appeared, the officer said, “there was no contingency plan. There was nothing . . . (but) paralysis.”

Fire officials also encountered what they considered to be an inadequate police response.

At one point, about 30 structure fires raged and about 20 fire engines sat idle waiting for police escorts who appeared available, said Deputy Fire Chief Don Anthony.

Fire officials were so “furious” that one top official went to the command post personally to “try and get it unraveled,” Anthony said.

“It seems,” he said, “like the command structure was not operating full bore . . . where it should have.”

Still, 77th Division Capt. Paul Jefferson defended Moulin’s actions and his assessment that it was unsafe to initially send officers into the troubled intersection.

“He (Moulin) was on the scene and he made his decision that from a tactical standpoint, he didn’t have a sufficient number of officers there do to deal with the situation,” said Jefferson.

“The officers’ lives would have been placed in jeopardy and they might have had to resort to deadly force. So he decided to pull them out and regroup. He was the field commander.”

Disclosures of Moulin’s decisions at the scene of the riot help answer one of the principal and most controversial questions surrounding the unrest: why so few police entered the fray during the riot’s initial stages. But they also raise new questions, such as why the Police Department apparently did not have an effective contingency plan and why so many captains were allowed to leave town at a time when the King verdict was expected to be returned.

According to a police source, thousands of emergency calls flooded the 911 system. Radio transmissions show that police dispatchers repeatedly tried to send units to the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where the riot began. But Moulin ordered his units not to respond to most of those calls and to leave the area and regroup.

“I want everybody out of here,” Moulin said on the tape.

Later, an operator broadcast a call that an assault victim was missing near the intersection.

Moulin, who other officers said was identified on the tape as 12L10, told the operator: “We’ll just take that information. For the present time we are not going to go in that area and search any further for anybody. I want all my units at (the command post) at 54th and Arlington.”

Some of the 911 callers phoned in while watching the horrifying live broadcast of the driver of a sand and gravel truck being badly beaten. The dispatchers tried to send units to help the truck driver but gave up. “No 77th units available to respond,” one said. “Stand by. . . .”

As many as 23,000 calls were made to 911 operators the first night of the riot, although it could not be determined exactly how many involved the early hours of the riot near Florence and Normandie.

As early as 5:30 p.m. last Wednesday, when trouble near the intersection first erupted with a milling crowd and reports of objects being tossed at motorists, radio communications show that trouble was already developing at other hot spots.

At Martin Luther King Boulevard and Coliseum, for instance, another group of 20 people were said to be throwing rocks at cars. And at Manchester and Normandie, a large group of gang members were reported looting and smashing windows.

In his interview with The Times, Moulin reconstructed the early moments of unrest from his vantage point and how he responded.

He said the incident at Normandie and Florence began when police received a radio call from fellow officers involved in a foot chase nearby. The officers reported that they had captured the suspects, but now “a large crowd was trying to get them and to lynch them.”

The officers radioed that they needed help, and Moulin said he responded with about 25 officers. By then, the crowd had swelled to several hundred.

“There was a tremendous amount of people that were very, very, very hostile and it was absolute anarchy. Anarchy was occurring before our eyes.

“They (his officers) were being bombed by bricks, bottles, chunks of concrete, 2-by-4s, and any other item that could be torn or ripped loose was being thrown,” Moulin said. “We were significantly outnumbered. My greatest concern was to have an officer injured or to have a citizen unnecessarily injured.”

Moulin, according to police radio transmissions, said: “I want everybody out of here. Florence and Normandie. Everybody. Get out. Now.”

On his way out, Moulin said, he rescued a New York Times photographer who had been assaulted and took him to the 77th Street station, where an ambulance was waiting. There, he said, he met with his superior, Capt. Jefferson, and requested that Metro Division officers head to the bus depot that had been designated as a command post in the department’s standing emergency plan.

“I told him to get back out there,” Jefferson said, adding that Moulin regrouped and took his officers back out to the Florence and Normandie area. There, the captain said, the officers “rescued a couple of more people that were trapped. . . . That was the second time they went in there.”

Radio tapes, in fact, show that Moulin did order a patrol car and helicopter into the vicinity to rescue an unconscious young woman who had been struck by thrown objects.

As the car took off for the hospital, also under a barrage, Moulin ordered all cars to the command post, telling them to ignore all disturbance calls in the process.

Excited police officers can be heard on the radio tapes repeatedly saying: “We don’t know what the f--- is going on. What the f--- are we doing here?”

A field supervisor suggested on the radio that Moulin declare a tactical alert--a step which would free dispatchers to assign emergency calls to units from other parts of the city. But Moulin said he first wanted to consult Capt. Jefferson.

By now, Jefferson said, he was concerned that violence at the intersection was exploding. He drove to the bus depot command post around 6:45--the time that television was broadcasting the violence, including the near-fatal attack on white trucker Reginald O. Denny.

Jefferson said that he did not have the advantage of watching events unfold on television. “I didn’t have a TV in my car,” he said. “And we didn’t have TV at the command post.” he said. Nor did he know whether the TV pictures he was hearing about were live or had been videotaped earlier.

Within seconds of arriving at the command post, Jefferson said, he received a series of anxious calls from police officials on his cellular phone. The first two were from Deputy Chiefs Matthew Hunt and Ron Frankle. They were watching the violence on television and they were demanding to know why no police units were there breaking up the disturbance.

“They inquired, ‘What the hell is going on out there?’ ” he said.

The 911 operators wondered as well. Reports of lootings, shootings and beatings were going unanswered in the 77th Division.

“I’m holding a 13-minute old hotshot (emergency call),” an operator said. “Should I assign it outside (the division)?

“No,” she was told by a field supervisor. “Assign it. But have that unit go to the c.p. (command post) . . . We’re going to get this thing together in a few.”

Shortly after Denny was beaten, officers in the communications division declared a tactical alert on their own, sources said.

At the command post, Moulin and others were working on assembling their officers into some sort of special squads.

“Be advised,” a field supervisor broadcast from the command post. “We have squads forming at this point to handle all radio calls and hotshots. . . . We don’t want any units (from other divisions) individually responding to any calls at this time.”

An operator who asked when the squads would be ready got no response. Meanwhile, the operators continued to broadcast emergency calls to 77th Division cars, but got no responses.

Jefferson said the situation was indeed chaotic.

He said at one point he turned to Capt. David Gascon, who was in charge of about 40 SWAT officers from a Metro unit assembled at the command post.

“I said, ‘We have to move, captain,’ ” Jefferson said. “They rolled to the (Florence and Normandie) area and they get to within a block and when the captain determined there were too many people there and it was too dangerous and that it was not tactically sound to go in.

“So he pulled back too.”

Times staff writer Stephen Braun also contributed to this story.

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