A group of legal organizations and attorneys has sent a scathing letter to Mayor Brandon Johnson and Police Supt. Larry Snelling ahead of the Democratic National Convention, pushing them to respect protesters’ rights while raising alarms about the potential for police abuse.
The group warned against “a repeat of the violence and violations committed by the CPD” during contentious demonstrations dating back decades, including those that cropped up around the 1968 Democratic convention and after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
“People have a right to exercise their First Amendment rights to speech and assembly, including rallying, marching and demonstrating,” the group wrote in the letter on Thursday. “We are calling on you to honor those cherished, sacrosanct rights.”
The letter was signed by 65 organizations, lawyers and legal workers, including the ACLU of Illinois and the Civil Rights & Police Accountability Project of the University of Chicago Law School. The law firm Loevy & Loevy, which represents the Sun-Times in public records cases, is part of the group.
The authors decried what they described as “intimidating comments” Snelling made in the lead-up to the convention next week, highlighting his assertions that peaceful protesters aren’t always afforded First Amendment rights and that demonstrations in the summer of 2020 broadly amounted to “rioting.”
They also expressed concerns about CPD’s new mass arrest policy, noting that provisions surrounding use of force reporting “may further allow officers to commit violent acts with impunity.”
Pro-Palestinian protests are expected to take center stage during the convention, with organizers expecting up to 25,000 marchers during major demonstrations.
Litigation in federal court that could affect the protests seemed to have been resolved by Friday afternoon. A judge earlier this week said she would not force City Hall to alter a path it had offered to groups planning to march over the Israel-Hamas war.
Leaders of the protests promised an appeal but never followed through. Instead, they sought relief because the city apparently said they couldn’t use stages, port-a-potties or sound equipment at Union Park. They withdrew that motion Friday morning following settlement talks.
“The [city’s] Law Department had to drop their unconstitutional denial of a sound system,” Hatem Abudayyeh, a spokesperson for the coalition leading the protests, said in a statement Friday afternoon.
“They knew it wouldn’t hold up in court, but they also knew that we have been organizing day and night to line up important supporters in Chicago who helped advocate for us too.”
Since the war in Gaza began after Israel was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, pro-Palestinian demonstrators have regularly taken to Chicago streets to call for an end to the fighting. The group of lawyers and legal organizations said police have met them “with violence, verbal harassment, and unnecessary arrests.”
Protesters should be allowed to freely march through streets during the convention, the group said. And police should refrain from dispersing crowds or making arrests “unless all other reasonably available options for restoring public safety have been exhausted.”
In cases that a dispersal order is made, the group said officers should issue citations for minor offenses and release demonstrators — “as opposed to arresting individuals and holding them for hours.”
During the convention, a defunct courtroom at the Area 3 police station at Belmont and Western avenues will be reopened to handle a potential influx of cases stemming from mass arrest incidents.
But questions remain over how exactly arrestees will be processed throughout the convention. The legal group insisted the city has offered “contradictory information regarding where people will be jailed and how family members and loved ones will be able to locate them.”
“If necessary, we will hold CPD and other law enforcement agencies accountable should they eviscerate people’s constitutional rights,” the group said. “Please do not force us to do so.”
The mayor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. A police spokesperson pointed to Snelling’s comments at a news conference earlier this week.
“We want people to exercise their First Amendment rights. We will protect them while they’re doing that,” Snelling said on Tuesday. “But we will not guarantee someone that we’re not going to make arrests if they start to act violently or commit crimes.”