On Thursday, Chicago’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report warning that the city and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) were unprepared for the protesters who will descend on the city for the Democratic National Convention in August.
Chicago hopes to avoid the bad optics of the 1968 DNC convention that saw then Mayor Richard J. Daley ring the convention site with barbed wire and finally call in the National Guard to quell the violence.
Who has 1968 on the DNC bingo card this year?
DNC Prepares for Chicago’s Worst – Without Mayor’s Help – POLITICS https://t.co/Kc1XDqvB1q
– CalRadioHost (@cal_host) May 10, 2024
Chicago is already facing a crisis with a shortage of police officers.
At a public forum with the Commission for Public Safety and Accountability last week, Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling said, “What we’re doing right now is making the best we can with the number of officers we have.”
Snelling added, “We’re down. We’re down almost 2,000 officers.
The latest from the OIG is the response to the “Chicago Police Department’s Preparedness for Mass Gatherings,” which is a critical review of the department’s misguided response to the George Floyd protests and riots in 2020.
The new report warns that while some improvements have been made since 2020, major concerns remain.
Concerns following the 2020 violent riots indicated that the CPD was “ill-equipped and unprepared to respond to the scale of protests and riots in urban areas.”
Furthermore, the OIG identified “failures in intelligence assessment, major event planning, communications and field operations, administrative systems, and, most importantly, on the part of CPD’s senior leadership.”
The February 2021 OIG report presented the following findings regarding CPD’s operational failures and deficiencies specifically in response to protests and riots:
- Violations in the mass arrest process resulted in CPD’s failure to arrest some offenders, the release of some detainees without charge, and risks to the safety of officers and detainees.
- During these events, the CPD did not fulfill its duty to report to the force and did not provide clear and consistent guidance to officers regarding their duty to report.
- The CPD’s operational response to protests and riots and gaps in relevant policies undermined accountability processes from the outset.
Furthermore, “The department recognizes the lack of planning documents, the lack of necessary equipment, and inadequate notification of day-by-day cancellations as areas for improvement. The department is committed to creating: a plan that categorizes responses in different levels of severity and protects retail corridors , a revised Emergency Mobilization Plan, and related training exercises to ensure smooth execution.
The new report warned that new police crowd control tactics, however, could lead to “escalating tensions” and constitutional violations against legitimate protesters.
The Chicago Tribune reported:
The report says some urban training materials related to crowd response rely on old theories from the 1960s and 1990s that hold that crowds have a tendency to affect individuals negatively and can lead to conflict or criminal behavior. Such beliefs – along with the assumption that bad actors are present – could risk “inducing or enhancing” CPD responses, the report said. More recent theories caution that the police response may cause the crowd to act more resistant and disorderly.
CPD guidelines also “continue to allow the use of OC spray on passive resistors in mass gathering settings,” he said, while other departments, like Philadelphia, “have clear guidance” that pepper spray “shall not be used” in First. Amendments gather against “passive resistors.”
The department’s policy is also less specific about when the department can use the corralling tactic sometimes known as kettling, Witzburg said. “No one said it was banned, nor did they give any indication of when it would be allowed,” he said.
Radical pro-Hamas protesters have vowed to disrupt the meeting.
