We seem to be facing the opposite problem. Mass illegal arrests and police brutality, developed to deal with Seattle-type globalization demos, failed to provoke civil-right-era outrage from the general public, and few people are even aware of them. But the did effectively scare people away from demonstrations.
I recently attended several very good sessions at the NLG annual national conference (the NLG is 70!) on mass demo defense, and I learned from people who do this work across the country that the Chicago experience was not atypical, even if it was, in Chicago style, dramatic.
The March 20, 2002 demo called when the Iraq war started involved an unplanned march of about 15,000-20,000 people down Lakeshore Drive. I was there as a legal observer. At the end of the long march in the cold (when many more people joined us), the cops (huge Cossacks in full armor with no ID) penned up several thousand people in a strip of street just off the fancy shopping district, refused to let people disperse, held them illegally for hours (I was one), intermittently charging into the crowd to bust heads and take people into custody. They ended up arresting about 300 people. Disorderly conduct charges against all of them were dropped, but the next demos were substantially smaller.
Most of the people at the first demo were not experienced activists or highly political people, just citizens outraged at the war. They had no idea what to expect and had probably previously thought the cops were there to help. At later demos and marches the cops would surround people with more cops than there were demonstrators, full armor and riot gear, two to four deep, and arrest people who fell behind or got of the negotiated permitted march route. This was intimidating. I've been doing this for decades and _I_ was intimidated. They arrested lawyers too -- an NLG legal observer from March 20 is the lead plaintiff in a large class action lawsuit being brought against the Chicago police for their conduct at that demo.
Now, most people have never heard of this, it was in the papers for a bit when it happened but it faded. And the highly sophisticated crowd control violations of civil liberties -- illegal arrests, some of them pre-emptive, as at the RNC in NYC, police violence and surveillance, diversion of demos from places where they might matter to side streets and remote "free speech" zones, etc., have not backfired the way Bull Connor's police dogs and the Montgomery FD fire hoses did. They do the main thing they are supposed to do -- chill dissenting speech. Years later the cops may have to pay large judgments with the taxpayer's money, but that's viewed as a Cost of Doing Business.
I don't know what to do about this, but I thought I'd comment on the phenomenon.
> We also need to think more carefully about what our
> demonstrations
> and protest marches can and can't do. Here we could
> take a lesson
> from Martin Luther King. His 1962 Albany, Georgia,
> campaign failed
> because the local authorities figured out that the
> success of King's
> mass marches depended on meeting brutal resistance
> from local
> officials. When they didn't forcibly stop the
> marches, the movement
> fizzled.
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