On Sept. 6 Chicago aldermen Edward Burke and Ariel Reboyras introduced an ordinance that would further criminalize protest in what is already one of the nation’s most militarized cities. The proposed law would ban the carrying of “firearms, knives, weapons, sharp objects, shields, fireworks, chains, bats, clubs, sticks, batons and any other rod-like instrument” during public gatherings. Further, Chicago police would be given permission to ban other objects from protests at their own discretion.
Anyone who has attended a protest knows how ludicrous the language of this proposed ordinance is. Protesters routinely carry banners, flags and picket signs, all constituting “rod-like instruments.” The aldermen claim that their proposal is a response to the violence which engulfed Charlottesville when fascists and Klansmen descended on the city, but the truth is that their bill is part of a wider attack on the progressive grassroots forces which repelled those same far-right aggressors. It is part of a wider crackdown on dissent.
The reality is that it is the Chicago Police Department which routinely shows up to protests armed and armored for battle, carrying military-grade weaponry and menacing oppressed communities with their own rod-like instruments. To give the CPD, already notorious for the suppression of dissent and the murder of unarmed Black people the unrestricted legal right to determine when and how the people can protest, would be a flagrant and obscene attack on the civil rights of the people of the city.
Alderman Burke is no stranger to such attacks. Last year he sponsored a similar ordinance, which would have elevated any alleged assault on a police officer to a hate crime. The so-called “Blue Lives Matter Bill” was another effort to criminalize protest, threatening any protester unlucky enough to fall afoul of a police officer with a felony. In the face of protests, that ordinance has gone nowhere.
We reject any attempt by the state to criminalize protest, no matter how they cloak their intentions in paternalistic language about our own protection. After all, it was not the police who defended the people of Charlottesville, Boston, or Berkeley against the recent reactionary violence. It was the people themselves, organized and mobilized in the thousands across lines of race, gender, and sexuality, who defeated the fascist mobs and militias.
The reactionaries in the streets were routed again and again in recent weeks and now the reactionaries in the halls of power are responding. They know as well as we do that it is the people united and in motion who make history and they are seeking to protect their own power in the current racist, capitalist system. Whether their proposal becomes law or not, we intend to remain in the streets fighting for socialism and the liberation of all oppressed peoples.
