RIOT AFTERMATH : Anti-Riot Unit Faded From Scene : Response: The strike force for urban unrest was designed to respond more quickly than the Guard. It fell victim to budget cuts and concern about civil liability in the 1980s.

The civil unrest strike force of the California National Guard that was disbanded in the early 1980s was designed and trained to respond to urban riots in half the time it took Guard troops to hit the streets of Los Angeles last week, say the general who created it and a military police colonel who was a key organizer.

The unit, known as the Law Enforcement Assistance Force, was established in 1975 by Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. and survived until Gov. George Deukmejian’s first term. It faded away in the mid-1980s, amid budget constraints in tranquil times.

The 1,200-member force, drawn from military police Guard units from throughout the state, was trained and equipped to be in place within 12 hours if needed. Last week, it took the Guard 24 hours to move, arm and assign the first 1,000 of its troops to riot-torn Los Angeles.

Guard generals insisted that their response to Gov. Pete Wilson’s call for assistance in the wake of the Rodney King beating verdict was as fast or faster than any comparable activation of the reserves to a civil disturbance. They acknowledged, however, that delay in transporting ammunition to Los Angeles and difficulty coupling Guard troops with local police units left soldiers idle in their barracks for much of Thursday, the first full day of rioting.

Former Guard Adjutant Gen. Frank Schober, who created the strike force for Brown, said in an interview Tuesday that it was established for situations just like the one that hit Los Angeles last week, after the four police officers were found not guilty in the beating of King.

Schober said the Guard’s infantry troops “hadn’t been particularly well trained” in crowd control and Brown wanted the ability to support local police, if necessary, without an intimidating show of military force.

With that in mind, Schober came up with the idea of coordinating the planning and training of the more than 1,000 reserve military police that the Guard had at its disposal, many of whom were active police officers in civilian life.

“A police officer’s doctrine for the application of force is quite different from that of the infantry,” said Schober, now director of Emergency Services for Solano County. “The infantry puts on maximum firepower. The police use, in most cases, the minimum necessary force. The police training seemed to me to be the ideal thing to capitalize on.”

With a federal grant obtained through the state Office of Criminal Justice Planning, the Guard purchased radios and light bars to convert sedans into squad cars, police-style helmets, face shields, batons and other gear. The officers had special training for their mission, including a riot exercise at Camp Roberts, a Guard base in San Luis Obispo County.

“We had the force ready to go with a declaration of emergency,” said Schober, who was not critical of the Guard’s performance last week. “It was possible then to put those troops in the field and link them up with the local police. They’d be speaking the same language and have the same experience.”

When the force was created, the military police stored ammunition in local armories, but that practice was later discontinued when all ammo storage was centralized to reduce the risk of theft or terrorism.

Because the military police carry .45-caliber pistols along with their M-16 rifles, they might not have had as much difficulty arming themselves in Los Angeles as did the combat troops, who had to wait for ammunition to arrive and for devices to convert the machine guns to semiautomatic action. In fact, one military police unit that came to Los Angeles last week was among the first to hit the streets, with ammunition borrowed from local police.

Col. Paul Monroe, an adviser to the state military reserve who was commander of the Alameda-based MP unit that formed the core of the Law Enforcement Assistance Force, also said the group was trained to respond within 12 hours.

“We couldn’t have done it much faster than that,” Monroe said.

Although the force was never activated, it was alerted a few times, amid fears that riots might erupt in overcrowded state prisons.

When Deukmejian succeeded Brown as governor, Willard Shank became adjutant general of the Guard. As a lawyer, Shank was concerned about the liability risk presented by the force. Shank said the military police who made up the force lacked sufficient training to be certified as peace officers under California law.

Without that certification, he said, the state risked being sued if a Guard member serving in a police role injured or killed a civilian. It would have been costly to provide that training, and the reserves would have needed extra time off from their jobs or free weekends for the added drills, Shank said.

“There were no riots between 1975 and what happened last week,” Shank said in an interview. “You couldn’t get the politicians interested in coming up with money for that.”

Shank said he never formally requested the money for added training and never discussed the issue with Deukmejian. He said he concluded on his own that it would be best to let the force die. He said it was a “paper organization” by the time he made that decision.

“I just didn’t figure that we should represent ourselves as being able to respond with 1,200 trained peace officers when we couldn’t do it,” Shank said.

Shank said he never announced publicly that the unit had been phased out. Monroe said the force’s equipment was collected and turned over to state civilian authorities.