POLICE
Surveilling Dissent
How CPD used the City’s gun-violence prevention center to monitor demonstrations last summer. BY JIM DALEY
A
t a press conference near the lake on the Friday before Memorial Day 2020, David Brown, the Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, announced the launch of the Summer Operations Center (SOC), a multiagency gun-violence prevention hub. Brown said the center had a singular mission: “Reducing murders and shootings this summer.” But internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that almost immediately after the SOC’s creation, with the onset of citywide protests against racism and the police murder of George Floyd, the police department began using the violence-prevention center to monitor and share intelligence about political demonstrations. The police continued to use the SOC to surveil political organizing throughout the summer and fall—even going so far as to quietly add protest monitoring to the center’s stated mission. Gun violence typically increases during summer months in Chicago. Under Superintendent Brown, who joined CPD in April 2020, violence prevention became the departmental watchword. The SOC—modeled on the department’s district-level surveillance hubs, called Strategic Decision Support Centers—was central to that mission. The SOC was housed in the Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) headquarters in the West Loop, and was staffed by employees of the CPD, the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, the Chicago Transit Authority, Streets and Sanitation, the Chicago 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ JULY 8, 2021
Housing Authority, the Chicago Park District, and other agencies. A May 20, 2020 letter from OEMC to agency heads described the SOC as a “partnership with CPD and the Mayor’s Office...over the summer to support citywide coordination around violence reduction.” The center operated overnight every Thursday through Sunday from May to October, with interagency briefings each evening. Notes from the welcoming statement for the SOC’s first evening briefing on May 23 said the center’s purpose was “a coordinated effort across all city resources, using geographic and crime analytic procedures in deployment of city resources to promote the reduction of violence.” To achieve that, SOC briefings reviewed intel on recent shootings and planned violence-suppression missions that blanketed target areas with surveillance technology such as license-plate readers, gunshot sensors, and thousands of video cameras, as well as sending “surges” of CPD personnel and police cruisers with flashing lights to strategic locations across the South and West Sides. How successful these efforts were in preventing gun violence, which reached historic levels in 2020, is unclear. What is clear is that the CPD also used the Summer Operations Center’s wide-ranging surveillance apparatus to monitor political organizers and plan missions to police demonstrations all summer. On May 25, then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and a widely shared cell-phone video of the killing sparked protests and uprisings in cities across
The SOC, whose mission was originally the prevention of gun violence, included surveillance of a peace walk in Washington Park and a ‘Gloves Up Guns Down— Deter Violence’ rally in the West Side neighborhood of Austin in its September 5 briefing. the country. In Chicago that Saturday, helmeted police escalated confrontations with demonstrators by attacking them with batons and chemical irritants. Police cars were soon set ablaze. Hoping to protect businesses in the Loop, the City raised bridges and suspended bus and train service. That evening’s SOC briefing included a “Protest Update” that outlined how traffic and bridges were being shut down and noted that “multiple arrests” had been made. Around the same time as the evening briefing, someone at the SOC sent police officers and Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection (BACP) inspectors to the Chicago Freedom School. The SOC sent the inspectors there because the school opened its doors and ordered pizza for youth who were trapped in the Loop amid the evening’s chaos. “The allegations were that they were providing shelter and preparing and distributing food to the
protesters,” wrote Ivan Capifali, a deputy commissioner at the BACP, in an email to CPD Commander Mark Harmon. “The request came from the Summer Violence Reduction Center (SOC) which BACP is also a part of.” At the next day’s morning briefing, the SOC’s mission had changed: it was now, “Continuing a coordinated citywide response to any demonstrations.” The briefing laid out the CPD’s “outer perimeter footprint” designed to protect the “Central Business District.” The City’s gun-violence prevention center had been operational for just one week before it trained its gaze on political dissent. The CPD—and by extension, the SOC—likely found out that the Chicago Freedom School was sheltering protesters by monitoring social media. At a press conference in August, Superintendent Brown announced the department was expanding its “capacity of looking at intelligence” (i.e., public social media
