Asking A Lot Of The Police

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By Newsweek Editors

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Police riot." The phrase had dogged Chicago since 1968, when cops attacked antiwar protesters at the Democratic convention. Last May, when I joined officers in crowd-control training for the 1996 convention, '68 hung in the air like acrid tear gas. Instructors carefully listed the legal rights of demonstrators. But some cops weren't impressed. Viewing film of the bloodbath 28 years ago, a woman sergeant murmured, ""Awrrright!" when the first nightstick thumped into a protester's gut.

At noon I met with three instructors in the police academy's atrium. It's dominated by a monument to seven officers killed by an anarchist's bomb at the infamous Haymarket Square riot of 1886. Police cadets see that statue every day. The occasional shooting of an officer on the street reinforces the statue's lesson: Chicago's a tough town, so let the pols worry about its image. The rest of us demand, correctly, that police put our rights above their safety. It's just one of the ways we ask a lot.

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