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LOCAL News :: Civil & Human Rights

Chicago Police Intimidation of March 20th Protest--Some Documentary Evidence

Despite intimidation by the City of Chicago, on Saturday thousands delivered a strong rebuke to the City for its attempt to shut down effective free speech.
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Reply to Mecklenburg.pdf
#file_1# It is a sad remark about the state of civil liberties in this town that we had to fight for the right to express ourselves in the same area that groups favored by the City, such as the annual St. Jude's police parade, have assembled for decades.

Indicative of this intimidation were some of the communications from the City following its politically motivated rejection of our permit request. Below is the text and pdf's of a letter sent on the Monday before the protest by Sheri Mecklenburg, Chief Counsel to the Chicago Police Department, to one of the protest organizers.

It manages to be untruthful, patronizing, and intimidating in turn. Little wonder that Mecklenburg is widely loathed by Chicago anti-police brutality activists, where her mendacity in defending brutal cops is well known.

Following Mecklenburg's letter is my reply, delivered two days before the protest.

During the weeks before the protest, gossip and news reports circulated concerning threatened arrests of protesters. The unfortunate effect of these was to do the Chicago Police Department's job for them by attempting to scare people away from denouncing the CPD's wholesale assault on civil liberties which occurred on March 20, 2003.

Even though many in the mainstream media couldn't seem to get it through their thick skulls, Saturday's protest was BOTH about the depredations of the U.S. government abroad, AND its attacks at home. This gov't can't pursue unjust and illegal wars abroad without stirring dissent at home. If that dissent is small enough, they will attempt to ignore it (with the media as willing accomplices). If that dissent assumes the broad proportions of the past year and a half, they will attempt to repress it.

In the face of the direct repression of last March 20th, and the riot-clad intimidation of this March 20th, it is no longer sufficient for activists to simply denounce the civil liberties depredations coming out of Ashcroft's Washington. The primary actor promoting this agenda at Saturday's protest was Mayor Richard M. Daley, and his underlings and yes-men in the CPD and local Democratic Party machine.

Here are the letters:

March 15, 2004

Mr. Andy Thayer
C/0 CABN
4404 N. Magnolia, #420
Chicago, IL 60640
By mail and hand delivery
Dear Mr. Thayer:

I was disappointed that, at our last meeting, you were not willing to work out an amicable agreement as to a reasonable time, place and manner for your proposed demonstration on March 20, 2004. I am now writing in an effort to continue to work toward a peaceful and lawful demonstration on that day.

I must tell you candidly that I was disconcerted by what appeared to be a lack of good faith on your part during our discussions. I assembled considerable police resources to meet with you and to investigate the feasibility of your proposal, but you told me over and over that you would not consider any modification of your proposal. We suggested several alternatives and asked you more than once if you had any alternatives, but you refused at all times to offer any alternative routes or times. When we last met, you had not yet filed your permit application, yet you informed me that you already had put out internet and flyer notices that the assembly and parade would take place on your proposed route. You then handed me a flyer showing me that you were directing the demonstrators to assemble at Michigan and Pearson, despite the fact that no permit had yet even been applied for. Moreover, you have to know that, given the more than 4,000 participants that you expect, assembly at Michigan and Pearson on a Saturday is unreasonable. Commander McCotter's letter to you of February 13, 2004 explains the traffic and other public safety concerns raised by the assembly of a large crowd at that time, place and manner.

Since we last met, you applied for a permit and the permit for assembly at Michigan and Pearson with a parade down Michigan Avenue has been denied. The denial offered an alternative, which you failed to accept. I assumed that I would then hear from you about alternatives. Yet, I understand from public documents that you continue to advertise for your demonstration at your originally proposed time, place and manner for which you have no permit. Certainly, in light of your extensive demonstration experience, you are aware of our permit ordinance 10-8-330 as well as the federal appellate ruling upholding the constitutionality of that ordinance, MacDonald v. City of Chicago. 243 F.3d 1021 (7th Cir. 2001), cert. denied, 534 U.S. 1113 (2002). I have enclosed a copy of both the ordinance and the court decision for you to review.

Andy, as I told you at our meetings, we have the utmost respect for the First Amendment right to demonstrate and speak freely. It is one of the highest honors and most serious obligations of the police to ensure and protect the proper exercise of rights under the First Amendment. It is because of that responsibility that we met with you, devoted police resources to examining the feasibility of your plan, proposed reasonable time, place and manner alternatives and asked you to submit alternatives for further consideration. Nevertheless, as the McDonald court stated, the right under the First Amendment to demonstrate and speak freely "does not allow ... participants to create chaos by disrupting traffic, impeding pedestrians, endangering themselves or other people, and otherwise causing gridlock on the busy streets and sidewalks of the city of Chicago." Further, as the McDonald court stated, the City has an obligation not only to permit citizens to engage in demonstrations, "but it is also obliged to protect the participants, to ensure their safety and that of others in the area, to maintain an orderly flow of traffic, and to prevent disruptive or even violent confrontations."

We want to ensure your right to engage in a rally and parade, but in order to do so and still meet our obligations of ensuring public safety, we must insist that you engage in the rally and parade according to the alternative time, place and manner provided by CDOT. Your continuing efforts to notify participants to engage in an assembly and parade where no permit has issued is not just irresponsible, it is unlawful. Although the parade ordinance provides for an appeal process and judicial review of any denial, you have not availed yourself of these lawful means of challenging the denial of the permit, but instead continue to plan the event in direct violation of the ordinance. As the purported leader of the rally and parade, I expect you to act responsibly by notifying the participants on your website, at your meetings, and through flyers that your permit for assembly at Michigan and Pearson and a parade down Michigan Avenue at the proposed time was denied, that an alternative route starting with assembly at Washington Square Park was proposed and that it is unlawful to hold a public assembly and parade in violation of the permit ordinance. I also want you to consider this letter as notice that your actions, as leader of the assembly and parade, are unlawful and that we will hold you responsible for any and all violations of the law.

Andy, there still is time for us to work out an amicable solution which ensures the demonstrators' First Amendment rights to hold a peaceful assembly and parade. If you have any proposal other than time, place and manner that you have initially requested, then please contact me and I will work with you toward an amicable solution. I urge you, Andy, to act responsibly.

Sincerely,
Sheri H. Mecklenburg
General Counsel
(312)745-6118

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Ms. Sheri Mecklenburg
General Counsel
Department of Police
Chicago of Chicago
3510 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60653
Via Hand Delivery and Mail

Dear Ms. Mecklenburg:

I am in receipt of your letter of March 15, 2004. Frankly, it contains so many distortions of fact and outright falsehoods that I find it shocking that such a letter could be approved for printing on City of Chicago stationary. The fact that you were a party to our two meetings with the Chicago Police and thus know many of your points to be false, I take as evidence of your bad faith.

Since there are so many errors of fact and intentional omissions of relevant evidence in your letter, let me go through them point by point:

1) Your citations of the law and legal precedent are frighteningly sloppy, especially coming from someone serving as general counsel to the City. Your errors in this regard would be laughable were not the First Amendment issues so serious, and the Chicago Police Department’s past transgressions of these and other rights so blatantly illegal. The fact that you would choose to present utterly fallacious arguments concerning matters of law can only be interpreted as an attempt to inflict a “chilling effect” on citizens’ attempts to exercise their free speech rights.

On Tuesday, the Tribune ran a story headlined “Anti-War Rally’s Route Still a Mystery to Cops.” That is an incredible assertion, and suggests that you have not bothered to communicate the plan that was clearly outlined in our meetings. I remind you that throughout our discussions it was always made clear that if a permit for the streets was denied, protesters would march on the sidewalk along the same route indicated on our permit request, as is our legal right. Moreover, on Tuesday, February 24, in reaction to the City’s denial of our permit application, we held a press conference outside the Mayor’s office on the fifth floor of City Hall, and stated this repeatedly. A march spokesperson, Dorothy Pagosa, was quoted in the next day’s Chicago Tribune stating this. It should be fair to assume that the City reads the Tribune, and takes note of what is said at news conferences held outside its highest office.

You charge that “continuing efforts to notify participants to engage in an assembly and parade where no permit has issued [sic] is not just irresponsible, it is unlawful.” You cite McDonald v. City of Chicago and permit ordinance 10-8-330 to back up this claim, when in fact your interpretation of these two items is utterly fallacious in point of written law and practical precedent. McDonald and 10-8-330 refer to the City’s ability to ban street protests, not sidewalk protests. No permit is required for marching on the sidewalks. As Commander McCotter has stated in a recent email reply to a potential participant in our protest, “The sidewalks are for everybody.”

The organizers for the March 20, 2004 action requested a permit to march in the street. The City denied that request, citing “reasons” that both protesters and their legal counsel find dubious, at best, and certainly a potential point of contention in the courts. Protesters chose not to challenge the City’s permit denial legally at this time, however, given the City’s abysmal history of attempting to box up permit battles in the court until well after an event date has come and gone, despite the fact that the City may – and has – been found after the fact to have been legally in the wrong in the past.

From the standpoint of practical precedent, the City’s attempt to intimidate with the threat of arrest is an utterly selective enforcement of its incorrect interpretation of the law. For decades now, the vast majority of left-of-center political protests in the streets of downtown Chicago have taken place without a permit from the City.

The City’s application of the permit law has been highly questionable and even illegal in the past. In 1996, during protests planned in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, the City threw up sweeping legal and practical obstacles to protesters, including consigning them to ‘protest pits’ a long distance from delegates or the convention site. Protesters were forced to battle the City in the courts for months on the permit issue, which remained unresolved until long after the DNC had ended – when the court agreed that protesters’ permit requests were legally valid and the City was, in fact, wrong to deny them permits. The City’s strategy to stall the matter in the court, however, effectively derailed protesters’ legal rights to take their message to the delegates during the DNC.

Typically, when a protest has more than 1000 people who are gathering on the sidewalk, the police have volunteered to allow the protest march to proceed on the street, with no prior arrangements, let alone written permits. The practical reasons for this include the fact that it is impossible with a high degree of certainty to predict in advance how many people will attend an event, it is safer for a large group of marchers not to be in proximity to plate glass windows to which the press of the crowd might push them into, it allows for pedestrians to go about their business unimpeded and allows merchants to have ready access for their customers, and because having people march a dozen or so abreast on the street, rather than 2-3 abreast on the sidewalk , vastly reduces the time in front of any given business, and requires far fewer officers to police, rather than a march strung out along a much greater length on the sidewalk.

The effort to request a permit was a courtesy to the City, but not a legal requirement to march on the sidewalk. The City’s response to the permit request confirmed the City’s tradition of bad faith in these matters.

2) You state that “when we last met, you had not yet filed your permit application, yet you informed me that you already had put out internet and flyer notices that the assembly and parade would take place on your proposed route.” You conveniently fail to mention that well before our meetings, I visited the City Department of Transportation (DOT), and at the request of the DOT’s Mike Simon, I delayed filing the formal application. Mr. Simon specifically requested that we hold off filing the permit application until after meeting with Commander McCotter. So any delay in the application for the permit was wholly the City’s responsibility. You might be interested to know that, before visiting Mr. Simon, as a courtesy I had sent copies of the application to Alderman Burton Natarus and Commander John Risley via certified mail and have copies of the receipts showing that the City was well aware of the intended route early on.

3) You state, “We suggested several alternatives and asked you more than once if you had any alternatives, but you refused at all times to offer any alternative routes or times.” Ms. Mecklenburg, you full well know, as was repeated many times in our meetings, that the location of Saturday’s march is intimately connected with the First Amendment message protesters will be conveying. The March 20, 2004 event is both in opposition to the illegal invasion of Iraq and the dramatic erosion of civil liberties at home that comes part and parcel with the prosecution of such illegal and unjust wars abroad.

As you well know, there has been much direct experience with such erosion of civil liberties here in Chicago. On March 20, 2003, Chicago Police officers, directed from the highest levels, conducted close to 800 illegal arrests and detentions of demonstrators and passersby just one block from our starting point. These arrests and detentions were so transparently illegal, that the States Attorney did not even attempt to mount a prosecution of these persons. Thousands of dollars of citizens’ property was intentionally destroyed by the police. Instances of unprovoked and excessive police violence were captured on videotape. To this day, neither the Mayor nor anyone else in an official capacity with the City has apologized for the illegal police actions on that evening. It is a sad statement that our Cook County States Attorney, a close political ally of the Mayor, has failed to criminally prosecute those responsible for these illegal arrests, thus leaving the illegally detained persons with no other recourse than to pursue civil action against the City.

The fact that your letter conveniently ignores these basic considerations as to the location of the event undercuts your claim of having “the utmost respect for the First Amendment right to demonstrate and speak freely.”

4) During our meetings and in its rejection of the permit, the City alleged that the event presented extreme logistical obstacles. As I stated to you at our first meeting, such objections are completely disingenuous. In fact, numerous previous precedents for the City’s accommodation of events in this same location exist. This reality clearly demonstrates the City’s favoring of the free speech message of some citizens over that of others, and thus directly refutes your claim of having “the utmost respect for the First Amendment right to demonstrate and speak freely.”

Since the City has so conveniently omitted reference to these precedents in its written communications regarding this matter, let me enumerate a few of them for the record:

a) Each year on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, all six lanes of Michigan Avenue are closed from
5–7 pm for the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association’s annual “Magnificent Mile Lights Festival.” In addition, Oak Street is closed from Michigan to Rush Street for several hours as a staging point for the parade. As a one-way eastbound street flowing into Michigan, Pearson Street, the staging point for our rally, is blocked for at least two hours as well. According to the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association, they have been doing their event for 12 years now. Their next “Magnificent Mile Lights Festival” will be on November 20, 2004, presumably with the full cooperation of the City. In response to your allegations about my alleged inflexibility, note that the permit application for this march requested only three of Michigan Avenue’s six lanes, rather than the complete closure of Michigan Avenue that occurs for the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival.

b) Each year for over 40 years, the police have held their “St. Jude's Police Parade.” As noted on the official City of Chicago website, the route of the 1998 parade was “north on Michigan Avenue from Superior to Chicago Avenue, west on Chicago to State Street, south on State to Holy Name Cathedral.” For last year’s parade, the official Chicago Transit Authority website noted that the City closed, in its entirety, “Michigan [Avenue] from Wacker [Drive] to Chicago [Avenue].” And as “Behind the Badge,” an official publication of the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, states: “Over 8,000 police officers and employees from Chicago, Suburban, County and State Jurisdictions march in the forty year old parade.” This is double the attendance you projected for the Saturday march in your 3/15/04 letter.

c) As noted in my conversations with you at our first meeting, there are numerous precedents for the City voluntarily shutting off all or part of Michigan Avenue for unpermitted marches. Such precedents include the Trans Atlantic Business Dialogue protest on Thursday, November 7, 2002, for which the City blocked off all lanes of traffic on Michigan Avenue between Wacker Drive and Ohio Street during a weekday evening rush hour.

Another precedent is the August 23, 2003 unpermitted march which proceeded from Federal Plaza, over to Michigan Avenue south of the Chicago River, and then all the way up Michigan Avenue to the park area just north of E. Lake Shore Drive (local). For this march of about 1500 people, the Chicago Police voluntarily closed off the three northbound lanes of Michigan Avenue.

5) The City made numerous, unsubstantiated logistical objections during our first meeting. The precedents noted above implicitly discount these objections, but nonetheless, let’s go through them one by one:

a) City’s Objection: Where could buses possibly disembark? Answer: The same places they do for the large events held at Holy Name Cathedral (735 N. State). I indicated there was flexibility in this regard, but received no counter offer from the City.

b) City’s Objection: The Pearson Street staging point would block access to Northwestern Hospital. Answer: Pearson Street is one block north of Chicago Avenue. Northwestern Hospital is on Superior Street, one block south of Chicago, and further points south. Presumably the St. Jude’s Day police parade, at Superior and Michigan with twice as many participants, presents a much more dire threat to the patients at Northwestern Hospital. Furthermore, in point of fact, Northwestern Security has been advising workers to avoid any possible traffic conjestion on Saturday by taking Lake Shore Drive instead. Certainly if Northwestern Unviersity has determined work arounds for possible traffic conjestion on Saturday, that should allay your concerns re: same.

c) City’s Objection: Pearson Street “is a major thoroughfare.” Answer: This is absurd, as any traffic count comparison with Chicago, Michigan or Oak (the staging area for the “Magnificent Mile Lights Festival”) would surely demonstrate. A concern regarding the entrance/exit to a parking garage was never raised by the City in our discussions, but was raised in the permit rejection and, it bears noting that I would have been more than willing to accommodate this issue by agreeing to keep Pearson open in the quarter block between Rush and the entrance to the garage. Instead, the City was so nonchalant about raising legitimate concerns, rather than red herrings, in our discussions, that it only noted this issue in its permit response. That cavalier approach on the part of the City suggests that a different agenda is in play.

* * *

In closing, let me restate what is planned for Saturday so that there is utter clarity in this regard:

1) We will exercise our right to free speech and assembly on Saturday, March 20, 2004, by marching on the sidewalks if necessary, along the route indicated on our permit application.

2) I reaffirm what was repeatedly stated in our meetings, namely that this protest is organized along the principles of peaceful, respectful, nonviolent expression of public dissent.

3) As a representative of the City of Chicago, please consider yourself on notice that should police behavior mirror last year’s police misconduct, this will not only further tarnish the City’s reputation, but will be met with an appropriate legal response.

Let me close by saying, in this time of cutbacks and layoffs in City services, it is disconcerting that the City has chosen to waste constitutents’ tax dollars in a transparent attempt to block legitimate expression of First Amendment freedoms.

Yours sincerely,

Andy Thayer
 
 

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