As activists look forward to Dem convention, ex-Chicago police officials look back to lessons from turbulent NATO summit

Shortly after Tuesday’s announcement that the Democratic National Convention will land in Chicago next summer, chatter about the violent convention here in 1968 reverberated across social media and stoked the partisan divide.

But former police officials say the city needs to look at lessons from a more recent turbulent event in Chicago, the NATO summit of 2012, which drew world leaders but led to the first terrorism case to be heard in a Cook County courtroom.

Steve Georgas, the former deputy chief of the Chicago Police Department’s special functions division, oversaw the strategic planning for the summit and said it hinged on training officers on crowd control, collecting intelligence and presenting a less-menacing public posture that relied on riot gear only as a last line of defense.

But the bench has cleared since then. “The entire leadership of the police department now were probably only the ranks of sergeants and lieutenants, if even that back then for NATO,” Georgas said. “So from a command perspective, as part of the NATO team, we’ve all left.”

But that won’t be the only challenge.

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Overall crime continues to rise, including in areas where the president, an ex-president, delegates and VIP guests will gather. The convention is slated for the tail-end of the summer, when gun violence typically spikes and police resources are stretched thin, meaning Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson could be forced to slash cops’ time off to fill shifts.

Meanwhile, the department’s troubled response to unrest that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 remains fresh in the minds of many Chicagoans.

“The eyes of the country will be on Chicago,” said former First Deputy Supt. Anthony Riccio. “The city wants to look good, and the police want to look good. But protests are always kind of a challenge, especially because the department is so understaffed right now.”

Former Supt. Garry McCarthy was on the front lines during the NATO summit, when fierce clashes erupted between police and protesters. But McCarthy, now the chief of police in suburban Willow Springs, insisted that department officials “didn’t want to escalate until we had to” and said he never authorized the use of tear gas.

McCarthy said he and his staff completed an “after-action report” that laid out what went right — and what didn’t.

“We didn’t come up with a whole bunch of things that we didn’t do right,” he said, pointing only to issues with communication and “discretionary resources.”

Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

While concerns over police staffing and safety hang over the planning for the Democratic convention, some help is on the way. The event has the highest national security classification, leaving the U.S. Secret Service in control of coordinating the security efforts.

Agency spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, a former Chicago police spokesman, said the Secret Service “will set up a team and work closely” with the police department, the Illinois State Police and the Cook County sheriff’s office.

During the NATO summit, Georgas said the police department bolstered staffing by partnering with those agencies and the Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm System, a partnership established after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to combine public safety resources. Also helping were cops from Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina, he said.

“They’ve gotta start looking at their manpower numbers and figure out how do we protect and keep our citizens safe,” he said of the city’s planning.

The police department released a statement saying “we look forward to working with our local, state and federal partners ... to ensure sufficient resources are in place to protect not only those attending the 2024 DNC Convention, but everyone across the city.”

There are already rumblings about protests on social media, though it’s obviously too early to say what will materialize.

An antifascist Twitter account complained that “Democrats want to occupy the city and make a circus for their failed state.” And a participant in a far-right Telegram channel wrote that the convention will be an “opportunity to unite” with antifascists and Black Lives Matter protesters.

Aside from the potential of large-scale demonstrations getting out of control, there’s also the possibility of jarring incidents of violence that would reinforce critics’ view of the city as lawless.

Riccio noted that delegates coming from across the country will “make good targets for the criminal element.”

“I think you just have to establish a strong presence downtown [and] a strong presence at whatever venues are being used wherever the parties are,” he said. “And just right away send a message that criminal behavior’s not going to be tolerated.”

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