Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention

Abstract

The behavior of the Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention was branded a "police riot" by the authors of the 1968 Walker Report (to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence), rhetorically placing the responsibility for their individual and collective actions squarely on the rank and file officers themselves.

Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention, by Frank Kusch. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. 206 pp. $44.95 cloth. ISBN: 027598138X.

The behavior of the Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention was branded a "police riot" by the authors of the 1968 Walker Report (to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence), rhetorically placing the responsibility for their individual and collective actions squarely on the rank and file officers themselves. And there is no question that many officers went into those seven days of confrontation with great animosity toward the anti-war demonstrators who had assembled in Chicago, nor is there any doubt that many of them also engaged in indiscriminant violence toward the demonstrators. Nonetheless, Frank Kusch's interviews with eighty of those officers more than thirty years later casts considerable doubt on the utility of the conceptual lens of "police riot" for understanding the origin and dynamics of police behavior during the 1968 Convention.

Battleground Chicago presents a detailed account of events leading up to the Convention, the week of often violent confrontations between police and demonstrators during the Convention and the recriminations that followed. Drawing upon extensive and diverse sources supplemented by his rich interviews with police officers, Kusch does a masterful job of nesting the events within the tumultuous American social and political context of that year. A flourishing counter culture, a rapidly expanding anti-war movement, the assassination of both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the subsequent urban disorders dominated the imaginations of the entire chain of command in Chicago from Mayor Daley down to the cops on the street. Daley had given "shoot to kill" orders to his police during their response to the disorders that followed the MLK assassination, and as the dissidents of all stripes converged on Chicago anticipating the Convention, local authorities geared up for action.

The efforts of authorities both in preparation for and during the confrontations provides a dramatic contrast with what subsequently became the standard operating procedure (SOP) for professionalized police departments that became adept at handling mass protests. This SOP functioned in later years to greatly enhance the likelihood that protester police interactions would be orderly and predictable. Elsewhere Clark McPhail and I have specified its key elements-we dubbed it "negotiated management." It rests upon an elaborated permitting system allowing protesters and police to negotiate the time, place, and manner ahead of protest events and operates during the events through communication between parallel hierarchies of command and control of police and protest groups. Almost every one of the decisions made by authorities in Chicago before and during the Convention violated the principles embodied in that SOP.

The Chicago police, incredibly, granted only one protest permit during the entire Convention despite numerous requests from dissident groups, thereby giving up one of the most effective tools police have for influencing where, when, and how protesters stage their gatherings. Daley had decided to stonewall the protesters by denying them permits, but, in addition, the police regularly arrested protest leaders denying the police, had they been inclined, the opportunity to negotiate with protest groups during the heat of confrontation. Together these choices meant that Chicago authorities forwent the most useful tools for anticipating and negotiating protester behavior, a deficit that, in practice, could not be made up by their hamhanded undercover surveillance efforts. Finally, although it was clear that large numbers of the protesters expected to camp out in lake-side Chicago parks, the police regularly and brutally enforced curfews in those parks, driving protesters into city streets late each evening. Not one of these decisions was the responsibility of cops in the streets, even though the decisions had enormous implications for the difficulties those cops faced.

So decisions by the "higher-ups" dramatically increased the likelihood that police and protesters would find themselves again and again in highly unpredictable public confrontations during the convention. But what about the cops in the street' Kusch's interviews make clear that the local culture of Chicago cops defined the typical protester as worthy of disdain and deserving physical assault, e.g. "They were ugly, dirty little shits . . ." (p. 151); "Those stinking long-haired bastards: they not only stunk but they were dangerous . . ." (p. 150); ". . . it was such a stinking rotten generation . . ." (p. 84); "We didn't want any commies taking down the American flag" (p. 126).

Had they acted primarily upon these motives, we might be justified in describing their collective actions a serial "police riot." However, the testimony of the police shows that officers were encouraged, even from the highest levels, to physically attack protesters. The words of two officers were echoed by many others:

"Let's face it, we knew we were supposed to thump the crap out of them, to teach them not to mess with Daley's city . . . We did it right across the boards-evenly, a good whacking, but just short of lasting damage, so none of us would lose our pensions." (P. 136)

"There was no question that boss Daley was calling the shots. His attitude allowed commanders to let things like the beatings go unchecked because it was their jobs and careers on the line if they were too soft on hippies, and they were not going to sacrifice that for some long-hairs. Daley knew he could handle the fallout of charges of police brutality-he was impervious." (P. 137)

Amazingly, as Kusch's assembled evidence shows, even in the face of great provocation by protesters, e.g. "Protestors continued to pelt police with firecrackers, rocks and bottles as the officers marched up Michigan" (p. 104), there were, in fact, almost no serious injuries to protesters or bystanders during that week; certainly not an outcome consistent with the occurrence of "police riots."

Battleground Chicago lacks any theoretical backbone. Nevertheless, Kusch's interviews contribute invaluable material to one wishing to decipher and make theoretical sense of what happened in Chicago during the 1968 Convention, and, that reason alone makes it an important contribution to the record of that watershed event.