By Andrew Harris
CHICAGO, IL (Bloomberg) — Chicago is bracing itself for Barack Obama’s hometown election-night rally. The event scheduled for Grant Park, known as the city’s front yard, may draw as many as 1 million people, Mayor Richard M. Daley said. Officials are hoping for a peaceful gathering, while preparing for possible violence that could further tarnish Chicago, which has the highest murder rate among the country’s biggest cities.
“You have to be concerned,” Daley said at a press conference on Oct. 28. “You get a million people coming. That’s a lot of people. You better be concerned.”
Daley also is trying to avoid the fate of his father, Richard J. Daley. He was mayor the last time Grant Park was in the U.S. political spotlight, during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when the nation saw televised riots and police beatings of Vietnam War protesters.
Tonight’s gathering will be held about four blocks from the site of the shooting of four people, one fatally, in July during the city’s Taste of Chicago festival. The murder was one of 427 in the country’s third-largest city this year.
That works out to one homicide for every 6,635 residents, the highest rate among the country’s largest municipalities. The Chicago figure compares with one in every 12,417 in Los Angeles and one in 19,103 in New York, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and local police departments as of Oct. 27.
“We’re not proud of it, but you don’t hide it,” Daley said of the murder rate. “We’ll get it down next year.”
Crowd Control
The city is closing streets, blocking park access and putting its entire 13,500-member police force on duty today. The police are coordinating their control of crowds with the U.S. Secret Service, assigned to protect Obama and his family.
“This is obviously a large venue but it’s not unprecedented,” Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said in a telephone interview.
Obama, 47, is returning to his political base to watch the results. He was elected in 1996 to the state’s Senate, representing the city’s South Side for eight years before his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. The Democratic nominee led Republican John McCain 60 percent to 38 percent in Illinois, a Nov. 1 Rasmussen poll showed.
In 1968, pictures published across the U.S. showed Chicago police beating war protesters with batons. Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff criticized the police during a nationally televised address for its “Gestapo” tactics. News photos showed the elder Daley responding with angry shouts at Ribicoff.
Different Times
Today, racial tensions have eased and unrest over the U.S. military in Iraq is more subdued than over Vietnam, making Chicago “a different place than in 1968,” said former alderman Dick W. Simpson, who teaches political science at the University of Illinois — Chicago.
Even so, he said, “there will always be some possibility of danger.”
Organizers expect 72,500 ticketed guests to witness what may be the election of the first black U.S. president. Obama will address the crowd in the southeast corner of the 325-acre park.
The July shooting during the Taste of Chicago festival came as a crowd estimated at 1 million dispersed after a July 3 fireworks display. Daley downplayed the risk of further violence on election night.
“That night will be a celebration,” he said at the press conference, discounting the possibility of Obama losing to McCain, 72. “nd we’re asking families and everybody to come together. Of course security is always going to be important.”
Wiping Out 1968
A park permit application filed by the Democratic National Committee said the event would include 7,500 participants and 65,000 spectators. Justin DeJong, an Obama campaign spokesman, declined to estimate how many people might actually turn out.
The Obama rally differs from the angry gatherings of 1968, said retired journalist Lois Wille, who was tear-gassed as she covered the Grant Park riots 40 years ago.
“1968 was protests, angry people protesting the Vietnam War and the angry cops who were slugging them over the head,” said Wille, who is author of “Forever Open, Clear, and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront,” a history of Grant Park. “If it is a great big huge happy evening, maybe it will wipe the memory of 1968 and the riots out.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Harris in Chicago at [email protected].