Chicago’s top cop credited his officers Wednesday after a protest against the war in Gaza devolved into violent clashes between police and protesters and resulted in nearly 60 arrests.
Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling said some of the people who joined the protest Tuesday outside the Israeli consulate in the West Loop grew violent and damaged property.
“That was their intent,” Snelling told reporters. “As a Chicago Police Department, we did everything that we could to deescalate that situation.”
Ultimately though, Snelling said protesters disobeyed repeated orders and “physically confronted and attacked” officers, prompting the response.
“We were not the initiators of violence,” he added. “But we responded to it, and our officers responded exactly the way that they were trained to respond.”
The small group of protestors are now marching away from Ogilvie towards Clinton Street, straight into a line of cops. #DNC2024 pic.twitter.com/bQn5ul1fKk
— Emmanuel Camarillo (@mannycam) August 21, 2024
Police reported 59 were arrested throughout the night.
The most serious case involved a 33-year-old Crystal Lake man accused of striking a cop. He was charged with a felony count of resisting or obstructing a police officer and other misdemeanors.
Eleven more people face a range of misdemeanor charges, including battery, reckless conduct, resisting or obstructing a police officer and theft. Forty-seven others were cited for other offenses, such as resisting a police officer or aiding escape, failing to obey a dispersal order and possessing paint or a marker with intent to deface.
Snelling said 22 of the arrestees were from out of state, and 14 had refused to provide a home address to police. At least three journalists were among those taken into custody.
Two arrestees were treated and released from hospitals, one for knee pain and another for a finger injury, the superintendent said. The same number of officers were hurt, though Snelling said they “refused medical attention because they didn’t want to leave their fellow officers.”
Snelling acknowledged police aimed to overwhelm the crowd when it became unruly, noting that police leaders created a plan on the fly to surround some of them.
The protest was organized by a group called Behind Enemy Lines, which promoted the rally by invoking the rioting and unrest that overshadowed the Democratic convention here in 1968.
“Let’s stop talking about 1968. This is 2024. The Chicago Police Department is proving that every single day,” said Snelling, who expressed his intention to restore Chicago’s reputation as “a beautiful city.”
As he credited officers and members of his command staff, the typically stone-faced superintendent became emotional while discussing “vicious, nasty” comments that were directed at female officers on the scene.
“Understand these are human beings — somebody’s mother, someone’s daughter, sister, aunt, niece — being spoken to in that way,” he said. “But they stood their ground, they did what they had to do.”
Michael Boyte, with Behind Enemy Lines, called the police officers the mayor’s “thugs.”
“There were hundreds of Brandon Johnson’s thugs, Brandon Johnson’s CPD ready to deny people their fundamental constitutional right to free expression in defense of the criminals gathered in the f***ing citadel of the United Center,” Boyte said.
“From the beginning, the police tried to shut down the demonstration,” he said. “Throughout the course of the demonstration, people were thrown to the ground. People were beaten with batons, people were prevented from leaving.”
While Snelling noted more protests were expected as the convention continues, he reaffirmed his confidence in his police force.
The next large-scale demonstration, led by the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine, was expected to kick off Wednesday afternoon from Union Park, which has emerged as a protest hub during the convention.
Cases wind through court
Earlier Wednesday, some of the protesters who were arrested a day earlier appeared before judges at a police station at Belmont and Western avenues, which is being used to process cases throughout the convention.
On Wednesday morning, supporters said they had waited for hours outside the station, setting up a table of food near an exit while awaiting the court hearings.
The man facing the sole felony charge was among at least a dozen people who were expected to appear in court throughout the day.
He allegedly knocked a police sergeant down when officers approached him during the protest at the consulate. He also faces misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest and theft for allegedly being in possession of a police radio that an officer left unattended.
Cook County prosecutors did not file a motion to detain him, and he was released with standard conditions that he return to court and not be arrested again while his case is pending.
Prosecutors sought to have the man banned from the area around the United Center, where Democrats are holding their convention. The man’s public defender argued the arrest near Halsted and Washington streets was far removed from the stadium, and Judge Mary Marubio denied the request.
Still, Marubio warned the man that picking up a new arrest could potentially threaten his release in the current case.
Marubio previously granted motions to ban protesters who were arrested in the United Center zone, but both of the people in those earlier cases were arrested in the area of the convention during a protest on Monday.
During another hearing, Judge Ankur Srivastava also denied a request by prosecutors to ban a man from the DNC zone at the United Center for the same reasons and under similar circumstances.
At least six other people arrested at Tuesday night’s consulate protest were scheduled to be brought before a judge Wednesday afternoon for a hearing to set conditions for their release.
The majority of them have minimal criminal backgrounds, if any, and faced misdemeanor charges. In a few cases, protesters only issued local ordinance citations were also being brought before a judge for a hearing.
Alexis Oiler, 32, said her partner was arrested on suspicion of failure to disperse, but she said he had been shouting at police officers from behind a tape line where police had instructed them to move.
“Police had been giving orders to disperse the whole time we were down there,” said Oiler, who is visiting Chicago from Ohio. “They wouldn’t let us leave, and that [area behind the tape] was where they told us we could stand.”