It seems everyone agrees that bringing the National Guard to Newark was a bad decision, because it escalated the riots. On the...
It seems everyone agrees that bringing the National Guard to Newark was a bad decision, because it escalated the riots.
On the other hand, once the riots were in progress, apparently national guardsmen killed 3 people while police killed 14. (Similarly, in the 1992 LA riots national guardsmen killed 2 people while police killed 8). I feel this adds some support to kontextmaschine’s thesis that militias are better than police for suppressing riots.
In the 1965 Watts riots the difference was not as extreme, but still noticable. According to the The McCone Commission report,
By 3:00 a.m. Saturday, 2,256 guardsmen were on the streets, and the number continued to increase until the full commitment of 13,900 guardsmen was reached by midnight on Saturday. The maximum commitment of the Los Angeles Police Department during the riot was 934 officers; the maximum for the Sheriff’s Office was 719 officers.
[—]
The final statistics are staggering. There were 34 persons killed and 1,032 reported injuries, including 90 Los Angeles police officers, 136 firemen, 10 national guardsmen, 23 persons from other governmental agencies, and 773 civilians. 118 of the injuries resulted from gunshot wounds. Of the 34 killed, one was a fireman, one was a deputy sheriff, and one a Long Beach policeman.
In the weeks following the riots, coroner’s inquests were held regarding thirty-two of the deaths. The Coroner’s jury ruled that twenty-six of the deaths were justifiable homicide, five were homicidal, and one was accidental. Of those ruled justifiable homicide, the jury found that the death was caused in sixteen instances by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, and in seven instances by the National Guard.
So there were 8.4 times more guardsmen than police on the street, but still police killed 2.3 times more people than the guard.
My dad who’d been an airborne lieutenant in the early 60s tells about once being called out to suppress a riot that from context was probably Newark ‘67 (he was living in the county just north of Philly, where I was born and raised)
They were ordered to march bearing unloaded rifles for show but said “fuck that” and loaded; when they heard firing from the next street over they shot out all the streetlights so as to make themselves harder to target from the street side buildings
Later they learned that was the soldiers on the next street over shooting out their streetlights, which was presumably why their commanders told them not to go out loaded
