E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dissenters’ lament As the Democratic National Convention heads to town, with its the usual posse of protesters, Boston is preparing for the worst BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

FOUR YEARS AGO, when the Democrats held their nominating convention in Los Angeles, serious protests were staged outside the Staples Center. That was less than a year after riots had erupted around the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, and at a time when radical leftists believed there was no significant difference between the two major parties. Exacerbating tensions, the party’s nominee, Al Gore, had been the Democrats’ most visible proponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement. An estimated 8000 people attended a protest concert in the streets of LA during Bill Clinton’s speech early in the week.

All told, the Los Angeles Police Department made 194 DNC-related arrests in 2000. In addition to demonstrators against Democratic Party positions, the arrested included activists from a grab bag of causes — "critical-mass bicyclists," animal-rights proponents, and activists for the U’wa people of Colombia. About twice as many were arrested at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia later that summer.

So it raised a few eyebrows earlier this month when Boston Municipal Court chief justice Charles Johnson let slip to the media that local law enforcement has made preparations to handle between 1500 and 2500 arrests during this year’s DNC at the FleetCenter. Even at the low end, that’s more per day than were arrested all week in Los Angeles.

The Boston Police Department won’t confirm Johnson’s figures, and of course the LAPD might have planned for just as many; its preparations were not made public. BPD spokesperson Beverly Ford says that the department expects to make as few arrests as possible. "We are going to allow people to protest, and if they break the law we’ll arrest them," she says.

But with the Department of Homeland Security warning of convention-week terror threats, the dozens of federal agencies in town will require a relatively calm environment to maintain surveillance. And Boston’s event will take place in the crowded heart of downtown, as in LA, where people had to go out of their way to get to the convention. Imagine: pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who have already received a permit, will inevitably cross paths with ardent Zionists in the area. Neo-Nazi skinheads watching the news might decide to hop the T downtown to provoke immigrant-rights demonstrators. The anti-globalization crowd might decide to storm the lobby of some corporation on their blacklist. For all we know, the PETA gang may have some obscure beef with the Frankenfood protesters — and just about anybody might start squabbling with the Naderites.

All of downtown could look like the entrance to the State House during the Constitutional Convention gay-marriage debate. "It’s going to be a challenge — and I say that with all respect to the police," says Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. "What happens when you get the pro-lifers and the pro-choicers in the same space?" And what happens when someone throws the first punch?

IN THEORY, the first step is to impose calm to prevent the storm. The Boston Police Department has given each of its officers 32 hours of training in how to disperse unruly crowds, plus specialized instruction as needed, according to Ford. Arrests will be made only as a last resort, she insists.

LAPD officers received 15 hours of similar training in 2000, and many observers alleged afterward that the cops nonetheless did more to incite unrest than to quell it. When the concert held during Bill Clinton’s speech ended with police firing rubber bullets and pepper spray into the crowd, the American Civil Liberties Union termed it "an orchestrated police riot." In another incident, 71 bicyclists were summarily arrested during a peaceful protest ride — after police had assured them they would be left alone, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"The majority of the police officers will want to see things go smoothly," says Boston attorney John Salsberg, who co-chairs Suffolk Lawyers for Justice (SLJ). "But there are always extremists or people with political agendas on both sides. I’m sure there are some police who would like to see the Democratic Convention tarnished, like in 1968," when riots raged in the streets of Chicago as the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey.

It’s not as if the Boston police are in a great mood to begin with. They’re in the midst of a two-year-old union dispute with Mayor Tom Menino that appears unlikely to reach an amicable resolution anytime soon (see "FleetCenter Blues," News and Features, June 4). However, Menino has called for a forced, arbitrated settlement before the convention on the grounds that the labor dispute poses a clear threat to the public welfare during the DNC.

The National Lawyers Guild plans to have an as-yet-undetermined number of legal observers in the area to keep an eye on police. These observers will wear some type of identifying hat or badge, and will be ready to take notes on any misconduct — assuming they are in the right place at the right time to see it. What good their observations will do is another matter, Salsberg says. "Where do you report police misconduct? Either to [police] internal affairs, or to somebody who’s in charge of what’s going on at the DNC, or somebody at the District Attorney’s Office. And then it would be up to them to do something about it."

Suffolk County DA spokesperson David Procopio, in fact, was unsure what the office would do if police misconduct is brought to its attention, and DNC organizers have no legal authority to deal with city cops. So it will likely be up to the department to police its own — if, that is, whoever files the complaint can pinpoint the details. "It has been a major complaint of demonstrators that they can’t identify the officer who is harassing or chasing them," Salsberg says. "I think all of the officers who are there should have their names displayed on their uniform, and be instructed not to take it off." (Such a step is not part of current plans, according to BPD spokesperson Beverly Ford.)

Ideally, police will help demonstrators, by ridding the area of disruptive individuals, says Elizabeth Keeley, chief of staff for Suffolk County sheriff Andrea Cabral. "Large demonstrations can go on very peacefully, and then there are people whose interest is to disrupt and prevent the free display of speech," Keeley says.

But police will have to deal with a mix of people with permits to demonstrate, people demonstrating or counter-demonstrating without permits, bystanders, and genuine trouble-makers — and the demonstrators and bystanders are unlikely to wear color-coded labels for easy sorting. According to the SLJ’s Salsberg, trouble in these situations (as in the LA concert fiasco) often starts with a few rock-throwers who want to stir it up. Pretty quickly you’ve got people running from the rock-throwers, people running from the police, and people obstinately standing their ground — and they can all look guilty from the perspective of a cop who’s looking to cuff whoever just beaned him with a rock.