Charlize Theron will make an appearance in Denver, but the city's police chief, Gerald Whitman, will probably skip the event. The actress is scheduled to attend an August 26 screening of The Battle in Seattle.
The 2007 film starring Theron dramatizes events in 1999, when anti-globalization demonstrations at a meeting of the World Trade Organization disintegrated into the country's worst political unrest since the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Activists vandalized and looted stores, and set fire to cars; police used tear gas, pepper spray, and billy clubs to subdue them. The WTO meeting was canceled.
Police arrested more than 600 people; 150 later won a settlement for wrongful imprisonment, and a federal court found that Seattle had generally violated the protesters' constitutional rights. Local authorities fired the police chief after they concluded that the city had been unprepared to deal with the crowds of protesters and a small number of self-styled anarchists who ran riot through Seattle's downtown.
Protesters organizing for the Denver convention have invoked the infamous Chicago chaos by naming themselves "Re-Create 68," but the more appropriate analog is Seattle, a medium-sized Western city unused to the kind of political protests familiar to Washington and New York City. The Battle in Seattle is far from an anti-globalism rant, and the film has earned positive reviews from some Seattle police commanders who say that it fairly shows the challenge confronting officers who had been inadequately prepared for the crowds and the violence.
One person working to avoid a remake of Seattle '99 is Mark Silverstein, director of the Denver chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Based on experience, he says, Denver isn't prepared to deal with thousands of protesters who are promising to peacefully disrupt the convention. Silverstein says he's trying to reverse a recently adopted Denver policy of arresting and holding protesters, rather than citing and releasing the nonviolent ones. Separate lawsuits are still pending over local and federal efforts to keep a protest parade away from the Pepsi Center, and to fence protesters in one of the center's parking lots.
Denver Police Department officials, who are hiring hundreds of officers from neighboring communities for the convention, have abandoned a plan to ship arrested protesters to jails outside the city. But a source in one large community nearby said that Denver has asked that jail space be reserved "in case it is needed." Denver has a general shortage of jail space, Silverstein said, and he is worried that the city hasn't disclosed its plan to deal with potentially hundreds of arrestees.
A spokesman for the Denver Police Department declined to comment on any aspect of the security preparations for the convention.
For Silverstein, there was a portent of the Democratic gathering in the way police handled a comparatively tiny demonstration last October by leftists protesting a Columbus Day parade as an affront to Native Americans. Protesters occupying a park in downtown Denver refused to follow police instructions to move and disperse, and about 80 of them were arrested and placed in city jails. Even though the vast majority of the protesters had been alleged to have done nothing more than trespass, Silverstein said that most were held overnight. The city later paid a settlement to some of the protestors after a judge found that they were wrongfully detained. Silverstein said he is hopeful that the police will reverse the policy to automatically detain anyone arrested in a nonviolent political protest.
This article appeared in the Saturday, August 2, 2008 edition of National Journal.
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