Yet the department had spent the past year wrestling with revelations of aggressive and sometimes brutal police work at its Rampart Division, which includes the neighborhoods just east of Staples Center. Televised images of police violence during the convention would prove devastating to a department still fending off federal intervention. There would be no gray areas, no concessions to the myriad forms of expression encompassed by the First Amendment. The order of the day was mobile field force, a tactic pioneered by the Metro-Dade police in Miami, Florida, and adopted by the LAPD on a massive scale. As one veteran officer described it, the idea is to control crowds through intimidation.
Lethal force is eschewed, but force of any other kind is maximized.
You psyche them out. That strategy found full expression Monday when riot squads broke up the crowd gathered to hear Rage Against the Machine in front of the Staples Center. The focus of official ire was a core of 20-odd anarchists who hurled bottles and chunks of concrete over a fence at officers, although the police response was to systematically clear the entire downtown area of pedestrian traffic. The most intense use of force and the most striking television images involved the liberal use of riot guns that spat glowing sparks as they fired stinging rubber pellets. But perhaps more impressive was the follow-up, the rapid deployment of officers as police swept the retreating crowd up Figueroa Street, past the 7th Street subway station and even past Pers hing Square.