Police across the U.S. fear a long period of mayhem and bloodshed. The magnitude of recent unstoppable campus riots and urban protests while we await the fall semester and the outcome of the 2024 presidential election in November, has reminded Americans that we are likely one BLM-type scenario from another explosion of race-fueled violence and chaos.
For starters, Congress still has no answers for why the Capitol Police had no standby reaction force on Jan. 6, despite significant intelligence that various radical groups would congregate that day in Washington D.C. The Capitol Police and trained military police units with riot control tear gas should have been prepared to disperse any crowd approaching the Capitol steps. (READ MORE: Don’t Dismiss the Trump Assassination Attempt)
Additionally, following May 2020’s police-involved murder of George Floyd and the ensuing “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests, government officials allowed BLM rioters from various groups to destroy significant portions of Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, and many other cities.
Letting this mayhem continue, night after night, proved to be a monumental and needless mistake. Today’s policymakers can learn a great deal from previous presidents of the United States and how they handled such situations, in several of which I was a participant. Below are the steps that government officials should take immediately to prepare for likely national nightmares, based, in part, on my experience with the socio-political upheavals of the 1960s.
Active Military Forces Prevent Protesting Crowds From Turning Into Mobs
During the riot-prone 1960s, after completing three years as an airborne infantryman in Germany during the Berlin Crisis, the Army changed my branch to Military Police and sent me to a six-week training course in riot control at Fort Gordon, Georgia. That was followed by an assignment to (then) Fort Bragg, N.C., the 503rd MP Battalion whose 750 soldiers’ main training was riot control.
In October 1962, the company I would soon command had just returned from President John F. Kennedy’s deployment to assist the legendary James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi. Our company of MPs marched through a cordon of fire to calm that campus. The following May the same company, with me in command, was in the lead aircraft that JFK dispatched to squelch the Birmingham riots. Our full MP active-duty battalion trained in riot control and remained in Alabama for two weeks before returning to Fort Bragg.
The unit’s mere presence deterred future disturbances in Birmingham. During the entire summer of 1964, the same MP battalion provided the city of Charlotte, N.C.’s police department with a week-long riot control course for which I was chief instructor. Each police officer learned when a crowd becomes a mob, and the important priorities of force to stop and control any disturbance. (READ MORE: Tim Walz, Unreformed Summer Soldier)
At the end of each week, our entire 750-man battalion staged a realistic demonstration in our “Combat in Cities” training area of an actual crowd in civilian clothes, carrying signs, as it turned into a mob. MPs would appear on the scene, employing the priorities of force sequence: soldiers slowly advancing with pointed bayonets, proclaiming via loudspeaker that the mob must disperse, and soaking the mob members with fire-truck-mounted water cannons. Next, they employed tear gas from backpack riot control agents and baseball-type grenades that explode (using white powder for training). Finally, we displayed our last priority of force: Rooftop sharpshooters with weapons to neutralize any rioters perpetrating serious crimes.
In 1965, two weeks after the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge incident, in which the legendary John Lewis was hospitalized by police brutality, President Lyndon Johnson ordered two active-duty MP Battalions, one from Texas and my unit from North Carolina, to protect civil-rights marchers on their trek from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led this procession. There were absolutely no incidents during that peaceful march, thanks to the involvement of these two trained active MP battalions, backed up by Selma’s and Montgomery’s police forces. None of these troops, including myself, will ever forget the protest’s climax: Thousands of peaceful Americans applauding MLK’s magnificent speech in front of Alabama’s State Capitol.
From 1980 to 1983 I was assigned a key planning position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and spent numerous hours working closely with the chairman and his service chiefs of staff. I believe all four chiefs and the JCS planners understood the President’s power and duty to deploy active military forces to overcome any disturbance that police or other civilian authorities, including governors, were incapable of controlling. Unfortunately, our current military leaders do not seem to agree.
In April 1968, while assigned to the Pentagon, I participated in President Johnson’s order to quash the riots that erupted in Washington, D.C. the day after MLK’s assassination. Units from the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg arrived in D.C. the morning after that tragedy. Almost 14,000 federal troops and National Guardsmen suppressed the four-day riot, the largest disturbance in D.C. since the Civil War.
Today’s Law Enforcement Is Woefully Unprepared to Handle Riots
Today’s preparations for our police forces and National Guard units appear inadequate for two reasons. First, 2020’s George Floyd-related carnage and the pro-Palestine actions on college campuses and elsewhere since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre in Israel have occurred more than a half-century since America faced unrelenting violent protests. The relative domestic tranquility between 1970 and 2020 decreased the need for and existence of riot-control expertise.
Thus, in recent years, both police and National Guard units that were ordered to quell riots have been ineffective. They have often stood still for hours or days, even when rioters hurled rocks and cement-filled bottles at them. Many appear untrained in proper curfew and dispersal techniques. This lack of skill has meant greater danger for these uninformed personnel and disastrous pillage for citizens. (READ MORE: Tim Walz’s Message on Murdering Babies: ‘Mind Your Own Damn Business’)
Beginning with George Floyd’s death and subsequent disruptions, officials from coast to coast let radicals riot night after night for months. Throughout that carnage, civilian and military leaders should have urged President Donald Trump to follow the examples of Presidents Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and even George Washington, who personally put down the Whiskey Rebellion.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge, President Trump received few, if any recommendations. Rather, he was excoriated and called a fascist dictator simply for suggesting that he might order the active military to protect cities from rioters, as 12 former presidents have done on 19 separate occasions, via their powers under 10 U.S.C. §§ 331-335, the Insurrection Act of 1807.
The moment a crowd becomes a mob, forces must take timely and appropriate action to protect lives, private property, and public facilities in every American jurisdiction. The active-duty military police must be called in by our president when necessary.
Had the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations followed these historical examples, the George Floyd riots and the Jan. 6 disaster might not have occurred. Likewise, the recent pro-Hamas destruction in our cities might have been squelched swiftly or never even launched. Today’s federal government would be wise to learn from the past and prepare itself against the next orgy of burning, looting, beating, and killing.
Presidents of the United States must never again fail to request active Army riot control forces to quell political violence across this land. America’s active military police battalions must be trained and used when necessary.
Colonel Joseph V. Rafferty served as Post Commander of the Presidio of San Francisco. Manhattan-based Fox News political commentator Deroy Murdock contributed to this opinion piece.