Nation: CHICAGO EXAMINED: ANATOMY OF A POLICE RIOT'

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Tale of Two Parks. The first violence took place on a Sunday night in and around Lincoln Park, which had been chosen as yippie headquarters. Like all Chicago parks, Lincoln had an 11 p.m. curfew, which had been on the books for decades but was seldom enforced.

Newsmen and other observers could not understand why Lincoln Park was swept clear each night at curfew and why Grant Park, opposite the Loop, was not. The report solves this mystery and, like so much in the confrontations, the difference came down to a matter of personality. The deputy chief of police in charge of Lincoln Park said that if the curfew was not enforced, yippies and others would take it as a sign of weakness.

The deputy superintendent of police in charge of Grant Park took the opposite view. He said that the decision not to clear Grant Park was his own and a matter of judgment. When no citizens complained, he felt, it was sometimes better to ignore a technical law violation than to create a major problem. Grant Park was to have its share of disruptions, but they did not happen on schedule every night, as they did in Lincoln Park.

Moreover, as Lincoln Park was swept by lines of police each night, the intruders were driven into the streets of the Near North Side and Old Town, Chicago's version of Greenwich Village. The police then found it necessary to reassemble and drive the demonstrators—by now intermingled with passers-by and curious spectators—off the streets. A clergyman complained that "by pushing these young people from the park, the police create a larger law-enforcement problem than they have if they let the youths remain in the park."

Diabolical Threats. The report makes clear that Mayor Richard Daley and his police and military aides appeared to accept at face value all of the fiery statements made by the demonstration leaders. Chicago's newspapers repeatedly listed diabolical threats aimed at the city, ranging from burning Chicago down by flooding the sewers with gasoline, to dumping LSD in the water supply, to having 10,000 nude bodies float on Lake Michigan. Also widely accepted was the boast that from 100,000 to 200,000 demonstrators would descend on Chicago. Actually, the report estimates, only about 5,000 demonstrators came from out of town—of the 668 persons arrested, 364 were from Illinois and of these 276 were Chicagoans.

The city's defenses were formidable: 12,000 policemen, 6,000 Illinois National Guardsmen and—on stand-by at suburban naval posts—6,000 Army troops equipped with rifles, flamethrowers and bazookas. Even before the convention began, the police were working twelve-hour shifts: at the height of the trouble, some policemen were on duty as long as 17 hours at a stretch and were obviously under tremendous stress.