The specter of 1968 – with its angry confrontations and police brutality – hung heavy over Chicago in the lead up to the Democratic National Convention, as if the largely uneventful 1996 convention never happened.
The public concerns grew even greater in May, when the city’s inspector general issued a report warning that the Police Department’s “outdated concepts and tactics” could endanger cops and demonstrators when the Democrats came to town to celebrate the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris to be the country’s next commander in chief.
None of those large-scale fears, however, came to pass.
“Can we stop talking about 1968?” Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling asked at a news conference Friday. “2024 is the new standard, and the men and women of the Chicago Police Department set that new standard out in the field.”
After a legal battle in federal court, where organizers accused the city of using a “made-up process” to silence criticism of Democrats’ support for Israeli military action in Gaza, city officials and protest leaders reached a deal that both sides found somewhat acceptable. The city designated a mile-long course that routed through a small park within “sight and sound” of the United Center but could hardly disrupt the Democrats’ gathering and demonstrators were given permission for portable toilets, a stage and sound system at Union Park.
In the end, protesters and police seemed largely content with their own outcomes even as they occasionally criticized the other side’s actions.
The demonstrators held their rallies — albeit with smaller-than-expected crowds — as planned and had their voices repeated by the scores of journalists covering their marches. Their events drew people from all over the country and tapped into the Chicago area’s diverse population, which includes the largest Palestinian community in the United States.
“They tried to push us miles from the convention, denied us canopies to keep people safe from the sun, denied us sufficient port-a-potties, painted us as dangerous, and squeezed us onto smaller streets, but we burst through,” said organizer Dod McColgan, logistics point person for the Coalition to March on the DNC. “Our message burst through that Chicago will not rest until Palestine is free.”
The Chicago Police Department ended the week without any major skirmishes or indelible images of violence similar those taken during the 1968 convention or even the NATO Summit protests in 2012.
“Of course we expected that,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, president of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. “We’ve always said we don’t need them (the police) to protect us. We’ve always said we don’t need them to keep us safe. The only responsibility they have is to not infringe upon our First amendment rights.”
The absence of failure, at least from Snelling’s perspective, equaled unmitigated success.
During a victory-lap news conference at City Hall on Friday, the superintendent again heaped praise on the officers assigned to DNC demonstrations. Snelling also credited the scores of CPD personnel who remained on their typical assignments — patrol officers, detectives, district supervisors, evidence technicians and others — throughout the four-day convention.
He previously criticized the insults hurled at his officers, including the graphic and sexualized language toward female cops.
“We watched these officers going through it,” Snelling said Friday. “We saw people yelling in their faces, yelling obscenities, and they maintained their cool throughout, they didn’t take the bait. So as a result of it, you didn’t see the activity that people expected to see.
Snelling — who was a constant presence at protests throughout the week — made sure to spike the football at his daily press briefings, as well, particularly the morning after protesters broke through protective fencing and breached the United Center’s security perimeter. After a fairly minor skirmish, CPD officers were able to fix the fence and clear an adjacent park of protestors.
“I couldn’t be more proud of how the Chicago Police Department responded under those circumstances,” said Snelling, who was present at the major demonstrations. “We put on display the training and preparation that we’ve been engaged in for over a year now.”
The rally organizers also deserve credit for the mostly peaceful week in which the protesters – whose anger was aimed almost entirely at the Democrats’ support for Israel and not law enforcement — often policed themselves. The majority of demonstrations had safety teams that kept participants within the designated routes, de-escalated budding confrontations, and encouraged people to disperse when officers asked.
“It shows that when you have some type of contact and collaboration with those who are organizing, that you can have a peaceful First Amendment gathering,” Snelling said.
Hours after the city heaped praise on its officers, the Coalition to March on the DNC, which organized two major protests, released a statement blasting CPD’s actions during both the lead up to the event and the convention-related demonstrations. While significantly inflating their attendance numbers, organizers accused authorities of threatening activists with mass arrests and creating unsafe, overcrowded conditions with a heavy police presence.
“CPD has no right to take credit for the work of our Coalition, which kept protesters safe and secure for the entire week of the DNC, when it spent months trying to stop us from getting permits and limiting the amenities we could use to keep the people safe,” the statement read. “Our marshals and safety team deescalated many tense situations, while police only instigated and exacerbated problems.”
In one instance, the safety captains also tried to draw protesters away from the breached security fencing, a collaborative gesture that drew the ire of some more strident activists. Behind Enemy Lines, the group that organized an unsanctioned rally outside the Israeli Consulate on Tuesday, used the cooperative feel of the permitted protests as a marketing point for their unapproved event.
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Thirteen demonstrators were arrested on the day of the fence incident.
“Most damningly, when some brave protestors actually broke through the barricades that seperated (sic) the protests from the people they were protesting, the protest organizers led the march away from the downed barricade, both abandoning an opportunity to confront the people responsible for the genocide and abandoning the most defiant of the protesters to be arrested,” the group wrote on social media.
At a few rallies, police took people into custody without any major displays of force. Instead, when crowds threatened to get unruly, they marched toward demonstrators and chanted “move back! Move back!” as they thrust their batons back and forth in time, a tactic that had a somewhat dystopian feel but achieved the intended result.
CPD officers assigned to the protests — who’ve seen their days off canceled and their shifts extended — often outnumbered demonstrators throughout each of the four days of the DNC. Snelling denied claims by some pro-Palestinian organizers that the sheer number of CPD officers was an intimidation tactic.
“Now they may feel like it was intimidating because they saw so many officers and that can be intimidating to anybody, but the way the officers responded … because they didn’t stop anyone from protesting or exercising their First Amendment rights…it’s proof that officers were out there for protection.”
Legal observers, however, have argued that Chicago police had a chilling effect on free speech after roughly 60 people were taken into custody during the protest outside the Israeli Consulate. The two-hour demonstration — the most chaotic of the week’s events — ended with mass arrests and the majority of detainees charged with misdemeanors or ordinance violations, including battery, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.
CPD made 74 protest-related arrests during the DNC — 13 on Monday, 59 on Tuesday and two on Thursday. Most resulted in municipal citations, according to the National Lawyers Guild.
Those ticketed for municipal violations spent hours in custody despite CPD’s ability to cite and release them in accordance with state law. The guild also said it received multiple reports of arrestees being questioned by detectives, while lawyers were at the station waiting to meet with their clients.
Three people have been charged with felonies in with DNC demonstrations, including one man who prosecutors said headbutted a cop causing the officer to suffer a concussion.
Four protesters were injured during the interactions with police and required hospitalization, according to the National Lawyers Guild. Snelling previously acknowledged two of those injuries, which he said included one person with knee pain and another with a finger injury.
“The massive shows of force and very aggressive posture toward First Amendment-protected activity, including the deliberate obstruction of a Palestine solidarity march from the Israeli consulate on Tuesday, indicated an intolerance to people’s free speech rights,” said Madeline Townsend from the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. “Police far outnumbered protesters on Tuesday, indiscriminately arresting people and often surrounding and corralling groups before conducting mass arrests.”
Through Thursday afternoon, CPD internal affairs and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability received a total of nine complaints that alleged some sort of misconduct by officers assigned to the DNC protests, according to a source with knowledge of the complaints. Further details of those allegations were not known early Friday.
City police officials also confirmed they were investigating a complaint against a CPD deputy chief following reports that Area 1 Deputy Chief Don Jerome spoke disparagingly about Palestinians and LGBTQ rights before one of the marches.
Crime throughout the city tends to be higher in the summer. Though Snelling pointed to year-to-year reductions in overall shooting incidents, homicides and motor vehicle thefts, at least 34 people were shot – seven fatally – from Monday morning through Thursday night, when the convention wrapped.
The victims included a 5-year-old boy shot Wednesday morning, as well as a mass shooting in the Back of the Yards neighborhood Tuesday evening that left one dead and five others wounded.
Conventiongoers were largely shielded from those crimes, which took place far outside their security bubble.
Authorities, however, have confirmed they are looking into two crimes involving DNC participants.
Snelling said police are investigating a report that a DNC delegate was robbed at gunpoint. Federal and local authorities are still trying to identify the people who entered the Fairmont Chicago hotel and put what appeared to be mealworms and sawdust on tables where delegates, including a group from Indiana, were being served breakfast.
The week’s final protest wound down Thursday night as Harris accepted the party’s nomination. As she finished her speech, Snelling stood on the median of Ashland Avenue, with a smile on his face as he kept watch over the demonstrators who held a brief sit-in in the street.
“You will not see officers clashing with them,” the superintendent said.
Moments afterward, the sitting demonstrators arose and started trying to walk back into the street, an apparent effort to start an impromptu march to the United Center. Police blocked their way into the intersection and after a tense five-minute bottleneck, a marcher with a bullhorn urged the group to disperse. Most did.
By 11:30 p.m., some 20 protesters were left on Ashland, chanting at the well-dressed conventiongoers trickling out from the United Center: “Shame on you! Shame on you!”
That confrontation, like most of the week’s flare-ups, also ended quickly.
Snelling stayed on duty as the last of protesters left, later telling reporters he didn’t sleep at all Thursday night.
“We set out to make sure that we kept the city safe while protecting First Amendment activity,” he said. “And we did just that.”
Chicago Tribune’s Caroline Kubzansky contributed.
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