Excerpt
from Takin’ It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader (1995: Oxford University
Press)
Rights
in Conflict: THE WALKER COMMLSSION
The commission appointed to investigate the events
surrounding the Chicago convention was headed &y Daniel Walker, later
governor of Illinois. Among the most significant findings of the Walker Commission was
that the Chicago police had provoked the crowd, encouraged by Mayor Richard
Daley. They had engaged in what the commission referred to as a 'Police riot.
" The following is excerpted from the summary of the report.
During the week of the Democratic
National Convention, the Chicago police were the targets of mounting
provocation by both word and act. It took the form of obscene epithets, and of
rocks, sticks, bathroom tiles and even human feces hurled at police by
demonstrators. Some of these acts had been planned; others were spontaneous or
were themselves provoked by police action. Furthermore, the police had been put
on edge by widely published threats of attempts to disrupt both the city and
the Convention.
That was the nature of the provocation.
The nature of the response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence
on many occasions, particularly at night.
That violence was made all the more
shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no
law, disobeyed no order, made no threat. These included peaceful demonstrators,
onlookers, and large numbers of residents who were simply passing through, or
happened to live in the areas where confrontations were occurring.
Newsmen and photographers were singled
out for assault, and their equipment deliberately damaged. Fundamental police
training was ignored; and officers, when on the scene, were often unable to
control their men. As one police officer put it: "What happened didn't
have anything to do with police work."
The violence reached its culmination
on Wednesday night.
A report prepared by an inspector
from the Los Angeles Police Department, present as an official observer ...:
There is no question but that many officers acted without restraint and exerted force beyond that necessary under the circumstances. The leadership at the point of conflict did little to prevent such conduct and the direct control of officers by first line supervisors was virtually non-existent.
He is referring to the police-crowd
confrontation in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Most Americans know about
it, having seen the 17-minute sequence played and replayed on their television
screens.
But
most Americans do not know that the confrontation was followed by even more brutal
incidents in the Loop side streets. Or that it had been preceded by comparable
instances of indiscriminate police attacks on the North Side a few nights
earlier when demonstrators were cleared from Lincoln Park and pushed into the
streets and alleys of Old Town.
How did it start? ...
Government--federal, state and local--moved to defend itself from the threats,
both imaginary and real. The preparations were detailed and far ranging: from
stationing firemen at each alarm box within a six block radius of the
Amphitheatre to staging U.S. Army armored personnel carriers in Soldier Field
under Secret Service control. Six thousand Regular Army troops in full field
gear, equipped with rifles, flame throwers, and bazookas were airlifted to
Chicago on Monday, August 26. About 6,000 Illinois National Guard troops had
already been activated to assist the 12,000 member Chicago Police Force....
... On August 18,1968, the advance
contingent of demonstrators arrived in Chicago and established their base, as
planned, in Lincoln Park on the city's Near North Side. Throughout the week,
they were joined by others-some from the Chicago area, some from states as far
away as New York and California. On the weekend before the convention began,
there were about 2,000 demonstrators in Lincoln Park; the crowd grew to about
10,000 by Wednesday.
There were, of course, the hippies---the
long hair and love beads, the calculated unwashedness, the flagrant banners,
the open lovemaking and disdain for the constraints of conventional society. In
dramatic effect, both visual and vocal, these dominated a crowd whose members
actually differed widely in physical appearance, in motivation, in political
affiliation, in philosophy. The crowd included Yippies come to "do their
thing," youngsters working for a political candidate, professional people
with dissenting political views, anarchists and determined revolutionaries,
motorcycle gangs, black activists, young thugs, police and secret service
undercover agents. There were demonstrators waving the Viet Cong flag and the
red flag of revolution and there were the simply curious who came to watch and,
in many cases, became willing or unwilling participants.
To characterize the crowd, then, as
entirely hippy-Yippie, entirely "New Left," entirely anarchist, or
entirely youthful political dissenters is both wrong and dangerous. The
stereotyping that did occur helps to explain the emotional reaction of both
police and public during and after the violence that occurred.
Despite the presence of some
revolutionaries, the vast majority of the demonstrators were intent on
expressing by peaceful means their dissent either from society generally or
from the administration's policies in Vietnam.
Most of those intending to join the major
protest demonstrations scheduled during convention week did not plan to enter
the Amphitheatre and disrupt, the proceedings of the Democratic convention, did
not plan aggressive acts of physical provocation against the authorities, and
did not plan to use rallies of demonstrators to stage an assault against any
person, institution, or place of business. But while it is clear that most of
the protesters in Chicago had no intention of initiating violence, " is
not to say that they did not expect it to develop.
It was the clearing of the
demonstrators from Lincoln Park that led directly to the violence:
symbolically, it expressed the city's opposition to the protesters; literally,
it forced the protesters into confrontation with police in Old Town and the
adjacent residential neighborhoods.
The Old Town area near Lincoln Park was
a scene of police ferocity exceeding that shown on television on Wednesday
night. From Sunday night through Tuesday night, incidents of intense and
indiscriminate violence occurred in the streets after police had swept the park
c ear of demonstrators.
Demonstrators attacked too. And they
posed difficult problems for police as they persisted in marching through the
streets, blocking traffic and intersections. But it was the police who forced
them out of the park and into the neighborhood. And on the part of the police
there was enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous
beating to make the conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots
of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for
crowd dispersal or arrest. 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.
Here is an eyewitness talking about
Monday night:
The demonstrators were forced out onto Clark Street and once again a traffic jam developed. Cars were stopped, the horns began to honk, people couldn't move, people got gassed inside their cars, people got stoned inside their cars, police were the objects of stones, and taunts, mostly taunts. As you must understand, most of the taunting of the police was verbal. There were stones thrown of course, but for the most part it was verbal. But there were stones being thrown and of course the police were responding with tear gas and clubs and every time they could get near enough to a demonstrator they hit him.
But again you had this police problem within--this really turned into a police problem. They pushed everybody out of the park, but this night there were a lot more people in the park than there had been during the previous night and Clark Street was just full of people and in addition now was full of gas because the police were using gas on a much larger scale this night. So the police were faced with the task, which took them about an hour or so, of hitting people over the head and gassing them enough to get them out of Clark Street, which they did.
But police action was not confined to the
necessary force, even in clearing the park:
A young man and his girl friend were
both grabbed by officers. He screamed, "We're going, we're going,"
but they threw him into the pond. The officers grabbed the girl, knocked her to
the ground, dragged her along the embankment and hit her with their batons on
her head, arms, back and legs. The boy tried to scramble up the embankment to
her, but police shoved him back in the water at least twice. He finally got to
her and tried to pull her in the water, away tom the police. He was clubbed on
the head five or six times. An officer shouted, "Let's get the fucking
bastards!" but the boy pulled her in the water and the police left.
Like the incident described above, much
of the violence witnessed in Old Town that night seems malicious or mindless:
There were pedestrians.
People who were not part of the demonstration were coming out of a tavern to
see what the dernonstration was ... and the officers indiscriminately started
beating everybody on the street who was not a policeman.
Another
scene:
There was a group of about
six police officers that moved in Rd started beating two youths. When one of
the officers pulled back his nightstick to swing, one of the youths grabbed it
from behind and started Rating on the officer. At this point about ten Officers
left everybody else and ran after this youth, who turned down Wells and ran to
the left.
But the officers went to the right, picked up another youth,
assuming he was the one they were chasing, and took him into an empty lot and
beat him. And when they got him to the ground, they jus kicked him ten
times-the wrong youth, the innocent youth who had been standing there.
A
federal legal official relates an experience of Tuesday evening.
I then walked one block north where I met a group of
12-15 policeman. I showed them my identification and they permitted me to walk
with them. The police walked one block west. Numerous people were watching us
from their windows and balconies. The police yelled profanities at them,
taunting them to come down where the police would beat them up. The police
stopped a number of people on the street demanding identification. They
verbally abused each pedestrian and pushed one or two without hurting them. We
walked back to Clark Street and began to walk north where the police stopped a
number of people who appeared to be protesters, and ordered them out of the
area in a very abusive way. One protester who was walking in the opposite
direction was kneed in the groin by a policeman who was walking towards him.
The boy fell to the ground and swore at the policeman who picked him up and
threw him to the ground. We continued to walk toward the command post. A
derelict who appeared to be very intoxicated, walked up to the policeman and
mumbled something that was incoherent. The policeman pulled from his belt a tin
container and sprayed its contents into the eyes of the derelict, who stumbled
around and fell on his face.
It
was on these nights that the police violence against media representatives
reached its peak. Much of it was plainly deliberate. A newsman was pulled aside
on Monday by a detective acquaintance of his who said: "The word is being
passed to get newsmen." Individual newsmen were warned, "You take my
picture tonight and I'm going to get you." Cries of "get the
camera" preceded individual attacks on photographers ....
A network cameraman reports that on the
same night:
I just saw this guy coming at me with his nightstick and I had the camera
up. The tip of his stick hit me right in the mouth, then I put my tongue up
there and I noticed that my tooth was gone. I turned around then to try to
leave and then this cop came up behind me with his stick and he jabbed me in
the back.
All of a sudden these cops jumped out of the police cars and started just beating the hell out of people. And before anything else happened to me, I saw a man holding a Bell & Howell camera with big wide letters on it, saying "CBS." He apparently had been hit by a cop. And cops were standing around and there was blood streaming down his face. Another policeman was running after me and saying, "Get the fuck out of here." And I heard another guy scream, "Get their fucking cameras." And the next thing I know I was being hit on the head, and I think on the back, and I was just forced down on the ground at the corner of Division and Wells.
Out of 300 newsmen assigned to cover the
parks and streets of Chicago during convention week, more than 60 (about 20%)
were involved in incidents resulting in injury to themselves, damage to their
equipment, or their arrest. Sixty-three newsmen were physically attacked by
police; in 13 of these instances, photographic or recording equipment was
intentionally damaged.
The violence did not end with either demonstrators or newsmen on the North Side on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. It continued in Grant Park on Wednesday. It occurred on Michigan Avenue in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, as already described. A high-ranking Chicago police commander admits that on that occasion the police "got out of control." This same commander appears in one of the most vivid scenes of the entire week, trying desperately to keep individual policemen from beating demonstrators as he screams, "For Christ's sake, stop it!"
Thereafter, the violence continued on
Michigan Avenue and on the side streets running into Chicago's Loop....
Police ranged the streets striking anyone
they could catch. To be sure, demonstrators threw things at policemen and at
police cars; but the weight of violence was overwhelmingly on the side of the
police. A few examples will give the flavor of that night in Chicago:
"At the corner of Congress Plaza
and Michigan," states a doctor, "was gathered a group of people,
numbering between thirty and forty. They were trapped against a r-ailing [along
a ramp leading down from Michigan Avenue to an underground parking garage] by
several policemen on motorcycles. The police charged the people on motor-
cycles and struck about a dozen of them, knocking several of them down. . . .
"
A UPI reporter witnessed these attacks, too. He relates in his statement that one officer, "with a smile on his face and a fanatical look in his eyes, was standing on a three-wheel cycle, shouting, 'Wahoo, wahoo,' and trying to run down people on the sidewalk." The reporter says he was chased thirty feet by the cycle....
"A well-dressed woman saw this
incident and spoke angrily to a nearby police captain. As she spoke, another
policeman came up from behind her and sprayed something in her face with an
aerosol can. He then clubbed her to the ground...."
"A wave of police charged down
Jackson," another witness relates. "Fleeing demonstrators were beaten
indiscriminately and a temporary, makeshift first aid station was set, up on
the corner of State and Jackson. Two men lay in pools of blood, their heads
severely cut by clubs. A minister moved amongst the crowd, quieting them,
brushing aside curious onlookers, and finally asked a policeman to call an
ambulance, which he agreed to do. . . .
Police violence was a fact of convention
week. Were the policemen who committed it a minority? It appears certain that
they were-but one which has imposed some of the consequences of its actions on
the majority, and certainly on their commanders. 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 (at the time this
Report is being completed-almost three months after the convention) has any
disciplinary action been taken against most of them. That some policemen lost
control of themselves under exceedingly provocative circumstances can perhaps
be understood; but not condoned. If no action is taken against them, the effect
can only be to discourage the majority of policemen who acted responsibly, and
further weaken the bond between police and community.
Although the crowds were finally
dispelled on the nights of violence in Chicago, the problems they represent
have not been. Surely this is not the last time that a violent dissenting group
will clash head- on with those whose duty it is to enforce the law. And the
next time the whole world will still be watching.