Police: How to Handle Demonstrations

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From Harlem to Harvard to Sunset Strip, the U.S. is on a demonstration kick. While collegians march against monogamy or multiversities, their once sedate mothers are mounting the barricades to battle school bussing or stop encroaching highway bulldozers. In one month, Philadelphia alone produced 15 demonstrations against such diverse targets as hard divorce laws, soft rape laws, slum landlords, black power, white power, and the Viet Nam war. Even the Janus Society hit the bricks, indignant because the Navy excludes homosexuals.

In drawing a line between lawful and unlawful demonstrations, U.S. police face a tougher task: they must keep order while protecting peaceful demonstrators' constitutional rights. And many police efforts are embarrassing failures. Although good intelligence work prevents and solves crime, few police can afford the time to study the widely varying plans and personalities of protest groups. As a result, they often send too few men to shield pickets from counter-pickets, or they go to the other extreme and send so many that they cripple law enforcement elsewhere. Worse, too many police respond too readily to demonstrators' taunts. And when choleric cops blow their tops, the skilled rabble-rouser is delighted, for it is "police brutality" that attracts TV news cameras and dramatizes "the cause."

Early Warning. To prevent such errors, Philadelphia police are developing a new specialist: the "civil-disobedience man." Founded in 1964 by former Commissioner Howard Leary, who now heads New York City's police, the Philadelphia civil-disobedience squad consists of only 24 members: a lieutenant, a sergeant, four policewomen and 18 elite policemen, half of them white and half Negro. Picked for warmth, patience and maturity (average age: 38), C.D. men are schooled in sociology and human relations; they study civil rights under University of Pennsylvania law professors. However small in numbers, the squad is worth a division of oldtime head bashers.

For one thing, C.D. men go out of their way to befriend all sorts of potential demonstrators long before they become uncivilly disobedient. "I can call up any one of them," says C.D. Lieut. George Fencl, "and they tell me just what they are planning. More often than not, they call me." As a result, the police department knows precisely what size force to deploy without wasting men. Sometimes an entire demonstration requires only two C.D. men (invariably a white-Negro team); alert to changing moods, the team can summon help quickly if things start to turn ugly.