regard emergency calls about victims at Florence and Normandie or ordered cars out of the area at least nine times during the hour preceding Reginald Denny's arrival (the trucker was pulled from his truck and beaten). A half-hour after the Denny beating, as 911 calls increased, Lieutenant Moulin and other supervisors were advising officers to stay put because they were forming squads at a bus depot that was serving as the command post.
However, the special command post had no television in it, so while hundreds of thousands of Americans watched the looting of liquor stores and the beating of Denny live, none of the officers of the 77th precinct did. Its few telephones were set up only to receive incoming calls. Lacking a working computer, supervisors had to track multiple emergency calls and deployments of police cars with pencil, paper and street maps. Officers stood disgusted beside their squad cars, listening with impatience to ever more urgent calls on the police radio while supervisors debated whether they had sufficient officers and riot equipment to intervene (Cotton, 1993, p. 21).
In the hour that followed Moulin's retreat, officers failed to implement virtually every time-honored crowd-control tactic. They failed to take the elemental step of sealing off traffic to Florence and Normandie by cordoning off nearby streets. They failed to confront the mob with a squadron of officers marching in riot gear. They had no field-jail units or buses in place; these would have enabled officers to arrest unruly crowd members and then turn them over to detectives without having to leave the scene to bring arrestees to the station. They failed to use tear gas or pepper gas to disperse the mob. They did not place police snipers atop tall buildings in the area. They failed to provide police escorts for firefighters during the early hours, so the fires could safely be fought during early outbreaks of arson. They also failed to sec...