For over three months activists who participated in the huge antiwar march of March 20 have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with city and county officials. “In some ways it’s not even about what happened on March 20,” says Andy Thayer, who was among the several hundred protesters arrested that night. “It’s about marches to come.”
According to the police, 730 people were carted off to jail, where they were held for up to 20 hours, then released. Most were charged with reckless conduct, a misdemeanor. About 190 were released without being charged because their arresting officers couldn’t be identified.
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The marchers counter that the police went overboard. Many of the people arrested say they went onto the drive only because the police let them. Other people arrested that night weren’t even antiwar protesters but commuters or tourists who got swept up along with marchers.
That wouldn’t be easy. Officially the decision to press or drop charges is made by Cook County state’s attorney Richard Devine. But in matters like this Devine acts at the behest of police officials, and they in turn generally do what Daley tells them. Yet Daley’s spokesmen say he had nothing to do with the police response that night–as hard as that is for many marchers to believe–and he has limited his public comments on the matter to a few prepared statements about the need to balance respect for law and order with the right to free expression.
Citing the class-action lawsuit, the police didn’t send a representative to testify when Moore and Munoz held their hearings on June 17. In fact, only three city officials–Moore, Munoz, and 46th Ward alderman Helen Shiller–showed up.
Moore says he’ll eventually issue a report summarizing the testimony. “I’ve not heard anything from Mayor Daley or his administration,” he says. “They didn’t send me a thank-you note saying, ‘Thank you, Alderman Moore, for bringing this travesty of justice to our attention.’ They’re sort of acting like none of this took place.”
