The History of National Guard Deployments in Black Cities, and Why D.C. Is Different

Omar Wasow was studying race and politics at Stanford University when on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted the police officers who beat Rodney King of almost all charges. For nearly a week, Los Angeles was on fire, as people raged against a verdict they viewed as unjust.

Within a day of the decision, President George H.W. Bush brought in the National Guard, a reserve U.S. military force that state governors and presidents can summon to respond to certain situations, including domestic emergencies. By the time the uprising ended on May 3, 63 people had been killed — nine by police — and more than 1,500 had been injured.

“You could not escape the footage of the beating or of the aftermath of the verdict,” Wasow told Capital B, adding that the uprising made a deep impression on him. “It was as big of a national issue as there ever was.”

The deployment of the National Guard to U.S. cities was on his mind again this week. President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he was sending around 800 members of the National Guard and 500 federal law enforcement agents to heavily Black Washington to crack down on crime, which is at a 30-year low in the city.

These actions are the latest in a long history of the National Guard being called in to address crises in Newark, New Jersey; Detroit; Los Angeles; and many other cities that have significant Black populations. But there are important differences between what has happened before and what’s happening right now, according to Wasow.

“Historically, the National Guard has been mobilized when there’s this effort to do crowd control,” he said. “But what we’re seeing here is mobilization for more conventional policing. You have individual incidents of crime that the police are well-equipped to handle and the National Guard isn’t particularly well-equipped to handle, yet it’s been brought in.”

Wasow added that, typically, calling in the National Guard is done in consultation with the governor or the mayor; officials also usually wait for about a day to see if tensions cool down. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser has described the takeover as an “authoritarian push.” The city has filed a lawsuit against the administration challenging its moves to commander the Metropolitan Police Department.

To learn more about the history of National Guard deployment, read Capital B’s conversation with Wasow, an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Capital B: When has the National Guard been summoned before?

Omar Wasow: The National Guard is usually called in when there’s some act of collective unrest, so for instance in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1965 [after an episode of police violence involving a Black motorist]. There were thousands of incidents of arson.

In some other cases, the event is much smaller. In Newark, New Jersey, in 1967, there was a protest that escalated to violence in the downtown or main commercial district. It was smaller compared with what happened in Los Angeles, but it went on for several days, and there was a mobilization of the National Guard.

What are the differences between what has happened in the past and what’s happening today?

One of the core challenges for police when crowds get very large is that they get vastly outnumbered. A lot of policing, as it’s currently organized, is much more of a one-on-one kind of thing. The police might pull somebody over or they’re in a neighborhood, but it’s not a couple of police officers and 10,000 people. That sort of crowd control requires a different set of tactics and a different sort of size of force.

And so what we tend to see is the National Guard mobilized not for crime but for these events where there are just huge numbers of people in the streets, and those numbers are used to justify needing to ratchet up the size of the police and military presence, because traditional policing and crowd control are different things.

But what we’re seeing Trump do now is almost the reverse. There was really just one incident that caught his attention — the attempted carjacking of a former Department of Government Efficiency employee — and that has precipitated this escalation in a way that’s atypical.

What was the fallout when the National Guard was deployed before?

There’s a big open question about how similar the present will be to the past. Part of what went really disastrously in a case like Newark is that there were thousands of rounds of ammunition fired by the National Guard in this urban setting, and 26 people were killed.

Basically, the National Guard, at least in that context, was ill-equipped for the situation, and it used wildly disproportionate force. What you get, as a kind of common pattern both in the past and the present, is officers hear gunfire, there will be allegations of snipers, and so then they start firing wildly. The snipers almost never turn up. It’s almost always “friendly fire.” But there’s this disproportionate firepower being used in an urban setting and people being killed in their homes.

That’s the worst-case scenario. When you have these explosions of anger — often quite justifiable anger — that play out for days, it’s usually Black communities that bear the brunt of the costs in terms of physical harm and material damage to housing and businesses. But what we’re seeing in Washington right now isn’t an act of collective violence that needs to be managed.

Do you think that things will get to that point today?

Since the mid-1960s, there’s been a major push among police forces and groups including the National Guard to do better crowd control. So though there’s still a very real risk of an escalation to excessive use of force, I think that it’s unlikely we’ll see that kind of undisciplined spray of fire in Washington in the way that we saw it in other cases, like in Newark in 1967.