Hardly riotous, the quiet anti-globalization demonstrations in Chicago last week nonetheless provided thousands of officers with valuable experience on how to handle potentially explosive situations, the department’s top training officer said.
In the post-Sept. 11 world, any massive mobilization of police presents an opportunity to train the rank-and-file officers, as well as their bosses, on how to handle a crisis, said Assistant Deputy Supt. Gary Schenkel, who heads the education and training division.
“As much as anything, this gave them a lot on the psyche of a crowd,” Schenkel said Friday afternoon as he drove around the Loop checking on police deployments.
Even though the demonstrations against the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue never turned violent, the three months of training, with new riot gear and new surveillance and monitoring technology, taught thousands of officers how to stay organized and keep lines of communication open amid the chaos of a crowd, Schenkel said.
The shiny black riot gear, with new bulletproof vests and shin, knee, elbow and shoulder pads, was the most visible product of the Police Department’s effort to prepare for the protest against the summit of American and European corporate executives, which ended Friday.
The equipment was so new that some officers were seen taking their nightsticks out of the plastic wrappers on the street Thursday night. But the behind-the-scenes planning may have been more important, police said.
Police created a command-and-control center at their headquarters, 3510 S. Michigan Ave., where personnel from the Police Department, the Department of Streets and Sanitation, Metra, Chicago Transit Authority, Illinois State Police, Cook County Sheriff’s Office and Chicago Department of Transportation huddled together, linked to their own computer networks, while watching big screens with maps and video gathered by police surveillance cameras.
The department recently invested in a satellite television system that allowed cameramen positioned around the demonstration sites to broadcast live pictures back to the command center via a satellite truck on the scene.
Police spokesman Patrick Camden said police had decided to buy the television equipment before they started planning for the protests, but last week was their first chance to try it out.
The center was designed to gather and trade information quickly so that streets could be closed or opened, officers moved or other decisions made based on the latest and best information flowing from the scene, police spokesman David Bayless said.
“Normally, most incidents the Chicago Police Department deals with are isolated within a single district,” Schenkel said. “This allowed information to travel all the way up the ladder to the first deputy superintendent and then back down to the patrol commander on the ground.”
Throughout the demonstrations, plainclothes officers also moved through the crowds with small video cameras, photographing the protesters. Police said that if crimes were committed, they can use the footage as evidence. Some demonstrators criticized the practice as intimidation.
Mayor Richard Daley defended the surveillance, which follows years of court-ordered limits prompted by the department’s alleged civil rights abuses during the Vietnam era.
“The courts [now] have given the Chicago Police Department the ability to employ the same investigations that every federal, state and suburban area has,” he said. “We are getting the same thing they have, the full practices of nearly every other police department in this country.”
Department officials said they won’t release any figures on what the training, planning and new equipment cost until later this week.
“That number has not been calculated because the conference isn’t over yet,” said Jacquelyn Heard, Daley’s press secretary.
The cost of any overtime required for police officers and other city employees, for example, cannot be totaled until workers’ various rates of pay and extra hours are computed, she said.
Police officials and Daley have said the cost was worth avoiding a potential repeat of the mayhem that disabled downtown Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization summit.
Schenkel said the groups that caused the havoc in Seattle were so unpredictable that police had to be prepared for anything.
“There was no indication as to who these people were and what they were going to do,” he said. “All we had to go on were the bad stories from Washington and Seattle.”
