The Office of Inspector General (OIG) in Chicago has issued a report suggesting that the city and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) are ill-equipped to handle the anticipated protests during the Democratic National Convention in August.
The city is keen to avoid a repeat of the 1968 DNC convention, which was marred by violence and the controversial decision by then-Mayor Richard J. Daley to surround the convention site with barbed wire and call in the National Guard.
The city is already grappling with a significant shortage of police officers. Speaking at a public forum with the Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling stated, "What we're doing right now is making the best with the number of officers that we have." He added, "We are down. We're down close to 2,000 officers."
The OIG's report was a response to the recent "Chicago Police Department's Preparedness for Mass Gatherings," a critical review of the department's mishandled response to the George Floyd protests and riots in 2020. While acknowledging some improvements since 2020, the report highlighted major concerns. It suggested that the CPD was "under-equipped and unprepared to respond to the scale of the protests and unrest in the downtown area" during the 2020 riots.
The report identified "failures within intelligence assessment, major event planning, field communication and operation, administrative systems, and, most significantly, from CPD's senior leadership." It also pointed out the department's lack of planning documents, a shortage of necessary equipment, and inadequate notice of the cancellation of days off as areas for improvement. The department has committed to creating plans that classify responses at different severity levels and protect retail corridors, revised Emergency Mobilization Plans, and associated practice exercises to ensure their smooth execution.
However, the report warned that new police crowd control tactics could potentially escalate tensions and lead to constitutional violations against lawful demonstrators. The Chicago Tribune reported that some of the city's training materials related to crowd responses are based on outdated theories from the 1960s and 1990s. These theories assume that crowds have a negative influence on individuals and can lead to conflict or criminal behavior. This belief, coupled with the assumption that bad actors are present, can risk "inducing or escalating" CPD's response, the report said.
The CPD's guidance also "continues to permit the use of OC spray on passive resistors in a mass gathering setting," while other departments, like Philadelphia, "have very explicit guidance" that pepper spray "shall not be used" in a First Amendment gathering against "passive resistors." The department's policy also lacks specifics about when the department can use corralling tactics sometimes known as kettling.
The report's release comes as radical pro-Hamas protestors have already vowed to disrupt the gathering. The city and the CPD will need to address these concerns to ensure a peaceful and orderly convention.
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