CHICAGO EXAMINED: ANATOMY OF A "POLICE RIOT'

IN Chicago, during the Democratic National Convention last August, two American rights collided headon: the acknowledged right to dissent within certain limits, and the equally valid right of a city to protect its citizens and its property. But what limits? And what kind of protection? Americans and the rest of the world were at first appalled by the way the police did battle with the demonstrators. But, almost immediately, pollsters reported that a majority of Americans believed that, given the provocation and the tense situation they encountered, Chicago's police had struck a notable blow for law and order. Months after the event, the conflict remains significant and symbolic of the deep divisions, the warring judgments in American society.

In Washington this week, a thick, well-documented report titled Rights in Conflict was issued by a Chicago study team under the direction of Daniel Walker, vice president and general counsel of Montgomery Ward. He had been assigned by the President's Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, headed by Milton Eisenhower, to determine what happened in Chicago and why and how. In preparing the report over a period of 53 days, Walker and his staff of 212 relied largely on 3,437 statements from eyewitnesses and participants, some obtained by staffers, others taken by the FBI and such agencies as the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago. The staff also viewed some 180 hours of relevant film taken by television networks, local TV stations, police and citizens.

The staff interviewers encountered some eloquence and much searing memory. During most of the traumatic week of the convention, a Los Angeles police inspector who was present as an observer thought that "the restraint of the police, both as individual members and as an organization, was beyond reason." But of the Wednesday night battle in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, the same official said: "There is no question but that many officers acted without restraint and exerted force beyond that necessary under the circumstances." As his policemen went out of control that night, the deputy superintendent in charge had to pull berserk officers off battered and bruised demonstrators, shouting at them: "Stop, damn it, stop! For Christ's sake, stop it!" The report confirms the earlier impression that the Chicago police force--in Mayor Daley's celebrated euphemism--"overreacted." But it also stresses the provocations they suffered and records some examples of police restraint.

The report also places the start of the confrontation considerably earlier than the convention week--there had been riots in Chicago's black ghettos in 1966 and again in April 1968, after the murder of Martin Luther King. Mayor Daley's own riot-study committee (Daniel Walker was No. 2 man) cited the restraint practiced by the police as a major factor in keeping the April riots from becoming even "more violent and widespread." But after April 1968, Daley criticized his police for their restraint and urged them to shoot to kill arsonists and maim looters. Says the report: "The effect on the police became apparent several weeks later when they attacked demonstrators, bystanders and media representatives at a civic-center peace march."

Tale of Two Parks. The first violence took place on a Sunday night in and around Lincoln Park, which had been chosen as yippie headquarters. Like all Chicago parks, Lincoln had an 11 p.m. curfew, which had been on the books for decades but was seldom enforced.

Newsmen and other observers could not understand why Lincoln Park was swept clear each night at curfew and why Grant Park, opposite the Loop, was not. The report solves this mystery and, like so much in the confrontations, the difference came down to a matter of personality. The deputy chief of police in charge of Lincoln Park said that if the curfew was not enforced, yippies and others would take it as a sign of weakness.

The deputy superintendent of police in charge of Grant Park took the opposite view. He said that the decision not to clear Grant Park was his own and a matter of judgment. When no citizens complained, he felt, it was sometimes better to ignore a technical law violation than to create a major problem. Grant Park was to have its share of disruptions, but they did not happen on schedule every night, as they did in Lincoln Park.

Moreover, as Lincoln Park was swept by lines of police each night, the intruders were driven into the streets of the Near North Side and Old Town, Chicago's version of Greenwich Village. The police then found it necessary to reassemble and drive the demonstrators--by now intermingled with passers-by and curious spectators--off the streets. A clergyman complained that "by pushing these young people from the park, the police create a larger law-enforcement problem than they have if they let the youths remain in the park."

Diabolical Threats. The report makes clear that Mayor Richard Daley and his police and military aides appeared to accept at face value all of the fiery statements made by the demonstration leaders. Chicago's newspapers repeatedly listed diabolical threats aimed at the city, ranging from burning Chicago down by flooding the sewers with gasoline, to dumping LSD in the water supply, to having 10,000 nude bodies float on Lake Michigan. Also widely accepted was the boast that from 100,000 to 200,000 demonstrators would descend on Chicago. Actually, the report estimates, only about 5,000 demonstrators came from out of town--of the 668 persons arrested, 364 were from Illinois and of these 276 were Chicagoans.

The city's defenses were formidable: 12,000 policemen, 6,000 Illinois National Guardsmen and--on stand-by at suburban naval posts--6,000 Army troops equipped with rifles, flamethrowers and bazookas. Even before the convention began, the police were working twelve-hour shifts: at the height of the trouble, some policemen were on duty as long as 17 hours at a stretch and were obviously under tremendous stress.

Who were the enemy? The report finds that they were a very mixed bag, running the gamut from pacifists, assorted peace groups, Communists, socialists, anarchists and New Left students, all the way to the yippies, who seem to have been the most baffling to Chicago authorities. The yippies appeared to be, in Norman Mailer's approving term, largely "existential," meaning that they lacked any clear-cut ideology or program. Yippies accept no leaders, not even their own, and Daley and his men could scarcely make much sense of yippie manifestos like that of Abbie Hoffman, who saw the movement as "new phenomena, a new thing on the American scene. Why? That's our question. Our slogan is Why? You know as long as we can make up a story about it that's exciting, mystical, magical, you have to accuse us of going to Chicago to perform magic."

The demonstrators had high hopes of reinforcing their ranks with the disappointed young who had followed Senator Eugene McCarthy--but McCarthy told his followers to stay away. They also hoped for a united front with the nation's black dissidents, but they were markedly unsuccessful in the Chicago slums, where many black organizations urged their members to "stay cool" and uninvolved. Several leaders of such gangs as the Blackstone Rangers left Chicago during convention week. But fear of a united front kept the Chicago police on edge.

Dangers Real and Rumored. The police found foes on every side, from naive demonstrators to wiseacre news men. The cops claimed that the bright TV lights blinded them and charged that the ubiquitous peering cameras emboldened demonstrators. Cameramen and reporters believed that the cops deliberately slugged them and wrecked their equipment in an effort to thwart coverage of police brutality. Fully 60 of the 300 newsmen assigned to cover Chicago's streets and parks "were involved in incidents resulting in injury to themselves, damage to their equipment, or their arrest."

The police themselves were prone to rumors, sometimes spread by their own intelligence reports. Before clearing Lincoln Park on Tuesday night, the cops heard that the demonstrators were armed with sharpened spears and at least one shotgun, and that they had strung piano wire from tree to tree at neck height in order to discourage the advancing police. None of these threats materialized, but they must have aggravated the officers' tense mood as they moved to the attack.

Sometimes the demonstrators were armed by inadvertence--as when sanitation men, approached by hippies who offered to help clean up Grant Park, innocently gave them sticks with pointed nails to skewer wastepaper. Some of these sticks were later used as weapons. The most severe police injuries seem to have resulted from accidental ambush. At least a dozen assaults occurred when demonstrators, desperately fleeing a line of advancing police, ducked down one street and up another and unexpectedly encountered either a solitary policeman or a lone squad car.

The report amply supports a fact long known to lawyers: witnesses of the same event seldom describe it the same way. A Grant Park clash between police and demonstrators began when half a dozen burly young men lowered the American flag and hoisted another object to the top of the pole. "Object" is used advisedly: though it was seen by hundreds of people and police and examined on film by the Walker staff, no one can yet say what it was. It has been described as a "black flag of anarchy," a "red flag" and a "Viet Cong flag." Some witnesses state it was a suit of red underwear or a red armband or a rag. On films of the incident, it appears to be "a knotted red cloth or a girl's bright red slip." Police, after a hard fight, pulled down the object, but not even the cops know what it was or what happened to it.

The report makes it very evident that the well-known "fog of war" hung heavily over Chicago. The violent struggle in front of the Hilton Hotel, which was televised around the world, apparently resulted from lack of communications.

While police were pushing the crowd against the hotel front, another body of police in a side street, alerted by a radio call of "policeman in trouble," charged into the flank of the already jam-packed crowd, ultimately forcing a score of people through a plate-glass window.

Provocative Obscenity. Words had such great force in the Chicago confrontation that the report must be the first in U.S. Government history to print "the actual obscenities used by the participants--demonstrators and police alike." The Walker study explains that the "extremely obscene language was a contributing factor to the violence" and "its frequency and intensity were such that to omit it would inevitably understate the effect it had." Since the report is otherwise couched largely in the turgid prose common to bureaucracy, the insertion of so many pungent Anglo-Saxon expletives relating to or synonymous with copulation creates a surrealistic effect.

Police are not normally apt to be shocked by four-letter words. But, as in the Columbia University uprising last spring, they were outraged to see obscenities printed on placards or hear them shouted by apparently well-educated, middle-class young men and women. The barrage of epithets helped convince some policemen that their opponents were scarcely human--and they all too often shed their own humanity. Witnesses frequently noted that if a demonstrator being chased by police got away, the cops would simply club whoever else was handy. A Chicago doctor drove up to one officer to report that protesters were dumping trash baskets into the street. The officer snapped: "Listen, you goddam -- --, get this -- car out of here." When the doctor tried to explain, the cop shouted: "Listen, you son of a bitch, didn't you hear me the first time?" and pounded a dent in the doctor's car with his nightstick.

It still seems incredible that in the days of violence no one was killed. Occasionally, trapped policemen would fire in the air. One unidentified civilian fired three shots, but no witness could discover his target. Nevertheless, the report is a warning that another confrontation might not be so fortunate. It notes: "To read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at firsthand the events of Sunday and Monday nights is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot."

LIFE points out in its current issue that the police districts known to be the most corrupt in Chicago also held the record for some of the worst violence last August. As the Walker report comments, there has been no public condemnation of "these violators of sound police procedures and common decency by either their commanding officers or city officials." Nor, when the report was being completed--nearly three months after the convention--had any disciplinary action been taken against most of the violators. But the Walker investigation may have had some effect on Chicago: last week, just before the issuance of the report, a Chicago police-department board recommended that four officers be dismissed for using "excessive force" during convention week.

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