Roughly 2,000 National Guard troops continued patrolling Los Angeles on Monday under an order from President Donald Trump following weekend protests in response to federal immigration sweeps. It was the first time the federal government had activated the guard over the objections of local officials in 60 years. Without providing any evidence, Trump claimed on his Truth Social platform that the protesters are “paid insurrectionists.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass condemned the deployment, describing it as federal overreach and a dangerous provocation. Early Monday, Newsom announced plans to file a lawsuit challenging the deployment. “That move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions,” Newsom said in a statement.
There’s a substantial amount of social science backing up Newsom’s suggestion. A large body of research, spanning more than 50 years, shows that heavy-handed policing and militarized responses to civil unrest tend to make protests more volatile — not less.
One of the earliest such findings came from the 1967 Kerner Commission, which investigated the causes of urban riots across the country. The commission found that in half the riots studied, aggressive police action, such as mass arrests or tear gas, had served as the catalyst for violence. The commission suggested that “abrasive policing tactics” should be abandoned in favor of de-escalation and engagement.
Experts say extensive research in the following decades has turned up similar findings. Escalating force by police tends to create feedback loops, where protesters escalate against police, police escalate even further, and both sides become increasingly angry and afraid.
During the protests against the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. mostly failed to adopt those lessons, repeatedly adopting a “force first” posture and showing up in riot gear, deploying chemical agents, and making mass arrests.