Chicago Demonstrators Losing Ground on Constitutional Rights

The just-concluded demonstrations against the TransAtlantic Business Dialog meeting in Chicago show what the government at all levels is preparing to stop public dissent.

There was a march on Thursday, November 7 of several thousand people, and smaller demonstrations on Friday and Saturday. There was absolutely no violence. Most of the marchers were organized by Chicago Jobs With Justice, unions, peace activists, and anti-globalization groups. There was an anarchist presence, but it too was completely non-violent. Yet the police mobilization was mind boggling, with more police lining the streets of Chicago than we thought we Chicago taxpayers where paying for. Police were got up like imperial storm troopers from Star Wars, and even the horses had dark glasses on. Some organizers feel that the participation of the public was chilled by this show of force.

During the entire week before the demonstrations, the City of Chicago and especially Mayor Richard Daley and police chief Terry Hillard engaged in psychological warfare against the demonstrations. The nonexistent possibility of violence was heavily played up by the city government and especially the scandal-sheet Chicago Sun Times.

The people of Chicago were told that hordes of violent lunatics were going to descent on the city (actually, most of the marchers were local, coming from well-known Chicago area social justice organizations). They were also told that the police were forming a "goon squad" of extremely large policemen, and that everybody who marched would be videotaped so that the police could act against lawbreakers later. It was announced that any damage to property would result in prosecution by the city to recoup costs. Further, the police announced openly that they would be placing undercover police disguised as demonstrators.

The City of Chicago once again put out false information about the legal history of its right to do these things. Since the Haymarket incident of 1886, the City of Chicago always maintained some kind of anti-subversive police squad designed not only to spy on, but to disrupt labor unions, left wing political groups and any organization critical of the status quo. In the 1920s this unit became known colloquially as the "Red Squad," one of many such units throughout the United States.

Over time, this unit spied on hundreds of thousands of individuals and thousands of organizations, including such unlikely "subversive" groups as the Methodist Church and the League of Women Voters. When Republican mayors were in power, the Red Squad spied on the Democrats. and when the Democrats were in power, it spied on the Republicans. Red Squad infiltrators sometimes acted as agents-provocateurs, inciting hotheaded members of dissident organizations to commit illegal acts so that the whole organization could be suppressed. At other times, the police set people up for assassination, as in the famous killing of Chicago Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969. A mostly African-American community group dedicated to social justice was destroyed by the Red Squad by the simple expedient of getting a Red Squad agent into a position of leadership, and then sabotaging the organization's administration.

In 1974, the Alliance to End Repression filed suit against the City of Chicago to shut the Red Squad down. Though the police tried to cover their tracks by destroying some of the Red Squad files, the publicity that the Red Squad suit created produced a wave of public revulsion against political policing in Chicago. In 1981, the city was forced to sign the Consent Decree which forbade the City of Chicago from spying on or disrupting constitutionally protected activities. Very soon, the City was found to have violated this Consent Decree, and was forced to pay compensation to some of the victims of its political cops.

For 16 years, the Consent Decree was in force. During that time, according to depositions obtained by Alliance attorney Richard Gutman from the police, not one single criminal investigation was impeded by the Consent Decree. Yet in March of 1997, Mayor Richard Daley went back into federal court to demand that the Consent Decree be drastically modified. Consent Decree signatories from the plaintiffs' side, including the ACLU and the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, strongly contested this. The mayor claimed that the Consent Decree was impeding investigation of street gang crime, preventing sharing of crime information by the Chicago Police with other police departments, and preventing the city from fighting hate crimes and terrorism. The city asked for full discretion on returning to spying, and for the right to videotape all street demonstrations.

The District Court Judge, Anne Williams, agreed with the defenders of the Consent Decree and disallowed the city's claim. However, the City appealed the case to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. On January 11, 2001, a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit basically acceded to everything the city was asking for and entirely gutted the Consent Decree. Judge Richard Posner, writing the opinion, essentially ignored not only the plaintiff's arguments but those of Judge Williams as well.

On this basis, the Police have re-written their rules for dealing with political dissent. Now they can drop their publicity claim that their wish to film demonstrations was "for training purposes," and go ahead and film everybody with the openly stated purpose of building up video files whereby they can identify individual protesters for later action. They return to the methods of the agent-provocateur, openly stating that they will be infiltrating policemen disguised as protesters into demonstrations. The fact that they announce it openly, besides revealing their arrogance, shows that the intention is also to chill dissent.

The return to a heavy-handed police control of political dissent in Chicago reveals the nature of the beast. Political powers that represent vested big business economic interests will always try to shut up those who criticize them.

It is time for all to wake up to the fact that city police departments obeying the will of local economic elites will now also be taking advantage of the new repressive regime in the United States. Not only must we guard against new police spying and sabotage, but we must be prepared to see anti-terrorism legislation such as the USA/PATRIOT Act, civil forfeitures and the RICO statute being used against legitimate dissent at all levels. And we must learn to fight back with broad united fronts against this coming attack.