LAPD Chief on Needing the National Guard: ‘Looking at the Violence Tonight, I Think We’ve Got to Make a Reassessment’’

Reporter: “Thank you so much, chief. You just described some pretty violent and chaotic situations. What is your position on the National Guard being deployed? Do we need them here?”
McDONNELL: “Well, you know, it’s an interesting question because I would have said that, you know, we could handle this. I believe that we would have gone through a number of steps before we’d have deployed the National Guard or requested deployment of the National Guard. We would normally go to 50% deployment to handle radio calls and do the business of policing, and everybody else would be focused on the initial problem. Beyond that, then we would request, through the sheriff, mutual aid, and that would bring in members of the 44 other police departments in L.A. County, as well as the sheriff’s office. And so that didn’t occur in this case because it wasn’t done through the sheriff or through the — up through the normal chain. It was done from the top down, from the president directing that that happened. And then the National Guard was federalized. So they’re working for the U.S. Army, not for the California state National Guard.”
Reporter: “Do we need them?”
McDONNELL: “Do we need them? Well, looking at it tonight, you know, this thing has gotten out of control. What they’re — I think before I could answer that, I’d have to know more about what their capabilities are, what their role is intended to be, to be able to make that determination. But we have great cops in southern California here that work together all the time. So we have tremendous capability here to say that we would go to that right away. I’d say we’re not — we wouldn’t have been there yet. Looking at the violence tonight, I think we’ve got to make a reassessment.”