The City of Chicago is feverishly erecting miles of security fencing all around the downtown area as the city gears up for the Democratic National Convention (DNC), which kicks off on Monday.
The security fencing is not only going up around the United Center and McCormick Place, but fencing is also being erected up and down retail areas along Michigan Avenue, also known as the “Magnificent Mile.” In addition, fencing is going up around the areas designated as protest zones.
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Road closures are already in place, practically shutting down the area from traffic.
The security zones were officially enacted on Friday to give workers more time to erect the fencing, and to put up concrete barriers to deter errant vehicular traffic, needed for Monday’s convention kickoff.
Social media is filled with images and video of the barriers being erected to keep Democrats attending the convention isolated in their secure zone.
At the same time, many downtown businesses contracted with board-up services to lockdown their retail outlets to deter the sort of mass destruction suffered during the riots in 2020 that wiped out so many of the Windy City’s retail outlets.
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The security efforts have been long gestating. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) reportedly trained for a year with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to try to protect the city’s 237 square mile area during the convention, CNN reported.
CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling also warned protesters that the First Amendment does not act as cover for “criminal acts.”
ABC7 reported that Snelling told CNN:
There is a distinct difference between the riot and a peaceful protest, or people who are simply actually exercising their first amendment rights. The first amendment for tat [sic] actions does not include rioting, it doesn’t include criminal acts … It doesn’t include breaking the law. It doesn’t include violence, vandalism, those things that we are not going to tolerate in our city. But if people are showing up here to exercise their first amendment rights, they’re doing it peacefully lawfully, we’re going to protect their rights to do that.
“The minute that starts, we have to put an end to it,” Snelling said of violence and rioting, according to Chicago’s WBEZ radio. “When people become comfortable committing acts of violence and vandalism, that’s when it turns into a riot.”
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