Convention Violence Is Not a Given

The city has more to fear from basketball fans than from environmentalists or WTO foes. Monday night’s disturbance after the Lakers’ championship victory at Staples Center was not a prelude to the Democratic National Convention at Staples Center in August. Bonfires will not be lit, nor squad cars or limos torched, at the entrance of Staples--not with the Secret Service in charge.

Instead, thousands of protesters plan to engage in peaceful civil disobedience at the convention, and even more will attend mass rallies and alternative forums. They will be challenging the Democratic Party on such issues as global trade policies that threaten human rights and the environment, and, closer to home, the effect of special interest money on society and the lack of opportunity for at-risk youths.

These anticipated thousands of people, acting in the American tradition of civil disobedience as a means of forcing change, will not be risking arrest lightly. They deserve a political response to their grievances. Instead, preparations for protests at the convention sound like war games, with police instead of politicians taking charge of plans and permits.

The most absurd example is the Los Angeles Police Department plan to limit demonstrations to within a fenced-off area on Figueroa Street. Anyone wanting to protest will be allowed 70 minutes--including time to pack and unpack their signs and props--on a first-come, first-served basis. This fencing in of the 1st Amendment will not work.

Getting the rigid ranks of the LAPD to understand protesters is like getting Darth Vader to understand hip-hop. Only last summer, the LAPD stormed Venice Beach to shut down a hip-hop concert, arrest the emcee and provoke a several-hour stand-off. After videotapes were reviewed that showed that the police overreacted, however, all charges were dropped. Cost to taxpayers: $5 million.

The danger of possible police overreaction at the Democratic convention was signaled in the recent LAPD proposal to obtain 20,000 projectiles of pepper gas, 200 semiautomatic launchers and 20 40-millimeter gas guns for the convention. The proposal to Gov. Gray Davis for the LAPD-generated list of crowd control equipment was hidden in a $4-million budget proposal for the California Highway Patrol. The Legislature rejected the proposal because it didn’t want to subsidize the LAPD’s secret plan after it was exposed.

Pepper spray is nothing to sneeze at. A 1993 U.S. Army study of oleoresin capsicum, the main ingredient in pepper spray, warned it is “capable of producing mutagenic and carcinogenic effects . . . as well as human fatalities.”

These secretive security plans have been accompanied by unwarranted vilification of the protest organizers. Last week, Mayor Richard Riordan asserted that there were “a few people who want to embarrass the city [by] throwing urine and dropping an inflammable bomb.” In April, unidentified authorities interviewed by The Times implied that activists might be planning bombings “and biochemical terrorism.” Of course, anything is possible in this violent society, as we saw Monday night, but the demonstrations in Seattle last November and Washington, D.C., in April were, in the main, nonviolent. Violence is not the protesters’ aspiration in Los Angeles, and the police should avoid any provocation that might provide a pretext for such outbreaks.

The only purpose of inflammatory official rhetoric now is to create a climate for preemptive police action in the form of denial of permits, closing of protest offices, seizures of equipment used for nonviolent lock-downs and the arrests of purported protesters even before they protest--the kinds of actions that rightly infuriated civil liberties groups in Washington.

It is not a given that the Los Angeles protests will attempt to shut down the convention. In Seattle and Washington, the direct action was against a closed and undemocratic group, the World Trade Organization. The Democratic Party is no such organization, regardless of what one thinks about its abandonment of key principles. For example, while organized labor is planning protests at the convention over WTO policies, its goal certainly would not be to shut down the convention, if for no other reason than the convention is anointing labor’s favored presidential candidate, Al Gore.

Yet the protest movement must not, and ultimately will not, be denied its right to launch direct action, just as impatient black students in the South went to jail for their beliefs in the early ‘60s. This August, the target, if not the convention itself, is the political symbols that show the connection between special-interest money and the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

The Democrats should immediately appoint a team of reasonable mediators to create dialogue with the protest planners and be a buffer between them and the police. There is no inherent contradiction between a safe convention and civil disobedience. A scripted convention paid for by corporate dollars and protected by clouds of pepper spray is not an acceptable option.