Police veteran and security training expert Scott Reitz – who served part of his career as a member of SWAT and was also part of the LAPD’s elite Metropolitan Division – recalls working during the 1992 L.A. riots along with other ill-equipped officers during wartime-style conditions.
Reitz says he had just left SWAT at the time of the L.A. riots, which he says “went down very, very suddenly” and caught the LAPD off guard. “I think nobody can doubt that the department itself was somewhat unprepared for it. I don’t think anybody anticipated the degree to which that would progress,” he said.
The first night he responded with other Metropolitan Division officers to the scene and proceeded to what became ground zero - 114 Street and Central - where he says a fire truck had just been fired upon and a fireman was hit. “We went to rescue them and as soon as we pulled up we came under intense fire.”
Reitz said that looking back on the riot events, he feels that he and fellow officers “did an absolutely superlative job of not engaging non-engagable threats,” despite not having adequate equipment to deal with the violent threats they faced.
“We didn’t have heavy body armor, basically we had our regular vests on and we just had some Vietnam-era vests that somebody pulled from some storage lot in the city, and threw out to us. They were literally, green Vietnam-era vests, I mean they wouldn’t have done very much at all,” he said.
“So we were actually battling incredible odds, and the gang members that were shooting at us, we later found out, had propped car doors up, they were shooting from portholes, they were sending a scout out to see out location.”
He said those firing at him had a person designated to keep tabs, and as soon as they would go back in, within 60 seconds, the volume of gunfire would increase. “Somebody out there has an audiotape of the gunfire, which literally sounds like a firefight in Vietnam – and that was at 114 and Central. So it was unusual, and wasn’t much of a party, to say the least.”
Watch the full episode to also hear a discussion of the issues surrounding the proper and improper use of deadly force by police officers, plus an update on the recent proliferation of school shootings across the United States.
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