7 reasons everyone is so worried about violence in Cleveland

As the Republican National Convention in Cleveland gets underway, the conventional wisdom is that things are likely to get ugly:

That’s overstating things. But not by much. Journalists going to cover the convention have gone through the sort of civil-unrest training usually reserved for reporters covering foreign revolutions. Some protest groups are reportedly staying home because they’re worried about violence.

It feels like 2016 is nearing a climax in Cleveland. Some of the year’s most important themes — escalating protests, racial conflict, police-community tensions, and Donald Trump — are all coming together, under the scrutiny of hundreds of reporters and thousands of people who know how to use smartphones.

At this point, everyone going to Cleveland understands that things could get bad. The biggest question is whether people will react with caution and avoid the worst-case scenario — or whether the fear of violence (and the conviction that it’s always the “other side” trying to instigate it) will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One reason people are worried about violence at the Republican National Convention is that violence is always a possibility at any convention — even those that don’t feature Donald Trump.

The emblematic images of convention violence are from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968, when Vietnam War protesters outside the convention hall clashed with police in a violent struggle while, inside, the Democratic Party was riven by its own dispute over the war.

But even if that’s an extreme case, there’s also a recent history of violence and property damage on a smaller scale at these events. During the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, police arrested more than 1,800 people in mass arrests that led to a class-action lawsuit, which the city lost.

At the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, protests led to property damage. About 400 people, including dozens of journalists, were arrested en masse on the first day, and police used tear gas, smoke bombs, pepper spray, flash bangs, and rubber bullets to stop an antiwar protest. (The 2012 convention in Tampa, Florida, was quiet, in large part because a hurricane meant only about 500 out of 10,000 anticipated protesters showed up. )

So part of the concern about Cleveland would apply no matter who the nominee was or where the convention was held. Particularly in a divisive political climate — opposition to the Iraq War fueled the protests in both 2004 and 2008 — there’s always a risk that a peaceful protest getting out of hand, or that the police will overreact in cracking down.

But in addition to the usual concerns around convention protests, Cleveland will also feature the presence of Donald J. Trump. And Trump’s campaign has attracted increasingly violent protests over the past year.

Trump won the Republican nomination by inspiring the vociferous support of the party’s racially conservative base: people who felt that politicians had been unable to protect them from mass immigration and globalization. Trump’s supporters see Trump as a transformational figure who can Make America Great Again. To many nonwhite activists, meanwhile, Trump’s campaign itself was an act of symbolic violence: a declaration that they personally were unwelcome in the US at best.

These two sides see each other as existential threats. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the clashes between the two have erupted into physical violence at or outside several Trump rallies.

At first, it was Trump supporters who were instigating violence against protesters — with the candidate himself encouraging his supporters to “knock the crap out of ‘em” and offering to pay the legal fees of anyone arrested in the process. But after several attacks protesters got more coordinated — and more aggressive. And protests outside Trump rallies steadily became more aggressive.

In late May, protesters in Albuquerque threw rocks and a burning Trump T-shirt at police officers and broke the windshield of a police car. In early June, in San Jose, protesters reportedly chased down and beat up supporters, threw bottles at them, and shook one supporter’s car. In Anaheim, a Trump supporter pepper-sprayed protesters in the face.

Eventually, the theme of “clashes” between Trump protesters and Trump supporters dominated press coverage, overshadowing peaceful and nonconfrontational protests, and possibly telling people looking for trouble where they could find it. By the end of the primary campaign, going to a Donald Trump rally — or to protest a Donald Trump rally — meant being prepared to fight.

As bad as the violence around past Trump’s rallies have gotten, things could get much worse at the Republican convention, particularly since several extremist groups have declared that they’re going to Cleveland.

In June, a rally of the white-supremacist Traditionalist Workers Party was met with a much larger (and aggressive) antiracist counter-protest, resulting in widespread fighting and several people being stabbed. In the aftermath of the rally-turned-melee, the party was quick to declare that it was going to go to Cleveland in force to support Donald Trump’s nomination.

Similarly, Bikers for Trump — a “patriotic” group of 30,000 members that has been providing vigilante “security” at Trump rallies since the primaries — has declared it’s going to “patrol” the streets of Cleveland during the convention.

“We need to stand against paid thugs and show them that things are done differently in America,” member “Big” Jim Williams wrote in a letter encouraging others to join him (as reported by Breitbart News). “If we don’t stand now, in Cleveland we are giving it to the third world thugs and will never get it back.”

They’re amassing against an unknown threat: anti-Trump activists have gotten permits for peaceful protests, but it’s unclear how many aggressive protesters are going to Cleveland to pull a Sacramento: aggressively confront, or even fight, Trump supporters and police.

Any gathering of this size and importance often features anarchists who are much more willing than typical protesters to damage property. There’s no way to know exactly how many “black bloc” members will be in Cleveland — as local station WKYC pointed out, anarchists don’t file for event permits. But everyone assumes there will be some, and possibly many, confronting both counter-protesters and police.

The New Black Panther Party has promised to attend, and indicated it might be carrying arms. But the NBPP doesn’t pose much of a threat itself, even if it may inspire some Trump defenders to expect a fight.

It’s worth noting that sometimes even just a few agitators are enough to set things off. Take the World Trade Organization protests and riots in Seattle in 1999. Those protests were, by and large, peaceful — until the presence of a small group of anarchists who began smashing windows downtown led to standoffs between militarized police and protesters. That kind of disruption, where a small group of unruly members turns a peaceful protest into an uncontrolled battle, is always a fear at events like these.

Concerns about violence in Cleveland have been pervasive since the spring. But they became even more urgent last week, after a sniper killed five police officers and wounded 14 people near the end of an otherwise peaceful protest against police brutality in Dallas. The shooting of six police officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday, three of whom have since died, are likely to amplify these concerns even futher.

The violence was a reminder that even a peaceful protest can provide cover for a violent extremist, particularly one who was apparently motivated by a political issue. On the heels of two police shootings in two days in suburban Minneapolis and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, it also contributed to a widespread sense that political violence was becoming increasingly likely in the United States.

Events like the Dallas shooting are very rare. But they’re also hard to prepare for and prevent — something underscored by the attack in Nice, France, on Thursday night, when a Tunisian national in France drove a truck into a crowd of people watching fireworks, killing at least 84 of them. It’s impossible to prepare for or prevent every kind of catastrophe, and the number of such events in 2016 has everyone on edge.

The list of things you can’t bring into the security zone in downtown Cleveland is long: tennis balls, hammers, canned goods, umbrellas, aerosol cans — just about anything that might somehow be useful in a protest or fight. But you can bring guns.

Ohio is an “open carry” state, meaning licensed gun owners can carry their weapons. That includes inside the security perimeter. Particularly after the shootings in Dallas, that’s leading to some obvious concern about pro- and anti-Trump protesters meeting in clashes that could become much, much worse if either side shoots. At least guns aren’t allowed inside the tighter security perimeter around the arena itself.

The Cleveland Police Department is more responsible than anyone for keeping all of this under control. But they’re dealing with their own issues these days.

In the aftermath of the killing of Tamir Rice in 2014, Cleveland’s police department was placed under federal oversight. It’s currently undergoing what Kyle Swenson calls “slow, painful surgery” to transform the way police work and repair their relationship with the community.

Now, in the midst of that surgery, the department is being faced with a challenge that would be tough even under the best circumstances: four days of tense situations, with every national news outlet in America (and thousands of protesters with cellphones) there to capture any lapse in professionalism on the part of the police.

The city has had a chance to prepare. Both Cleveland and Philadelphia got $50 million from the federal government for security for this year’s conventions; Cleveland famously spent part of its grant on riot gear for officers. But even as of mid-June, according to the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association (the police union), officers still hadn’t received it.

Law enforcement has been the most vocal critic of the city’s security planning. For months, the Patrolmen’s Association has complained that the city was sending officers out to fail. “They’re counting on the fact that these men and women are going to go into harm’s way,” president Steve Loomis said on July 6. Various police departments around the country refused to send officers to Cleveland to supplement its security force, making it harder for the city to meet its goals of recruiting 2,500 additional officers for the convention.

As police responses to protests over the past two years have shown, when police feel they don’t have the respect of their communities or of their governments, they’re more likely to act aggressively and disrespectfully themselves — especially toward protesters.

When Loomis said in June that “if this thing goes bad, we will be well on record on why it went bad,” he wasn’t clear about what “going bad” would look like — but it certainly laid the groundwork for officers, down the road, to claim that they had no choice but to aggressively crack down on protesters because the city hadn’t given them another strategy.

This situation may be worsened by the set-up of the convention. The zoning requirements, a result of a compromise between the city and the ACLU, will create “security zones” immediately around major convention areas (with fencing and military-style checkpoints) and a broader “event zone,” intended for permitted protesters, into which people can’t bring certain items.

The zoning plan provides plenty of opportunities for protesters and counter-protesters to run into each other and start trouble. But it also provides ample justification for police officers to argue protesters were violating the terms of their permit, or the terms of the event zone, and therefore a 1968-style (or Baton Rouge-style) crackdown is justified.

In the run-up to the convention, the city of Cleveland increased its liability insurance policy from $10 million to $50 million. You can see that as a sign of preparation. Or you can see it as an acknowledgment that things are likely to get more than $10 million worth of bad.

In the months leading up to the RNC, we’ve seen alarmist headlines about the possibility for serious violence. Jails are emptying their cells and hospitals are making sure they have doctors on duty.

At some point, the predictions of violence start to become self-reinforcing: The more police departments fear unrest, the more they prepare an aggressive response to protesters. The more that leaders — including top US officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson — say that they expect violence, the more they create the expectation that violence will occur.

There are a lot of valid reasons to fear at least minor violence and property damage at the Republican National Convention. But the near-universal expectation that it will occur is also becoming part of an entrenched narrative. Everyone is saying that violence is expected because everyone else is saying that violence is expected. America feels like it’s on the verge of something disruptive and chaotic. Cleveland just became a focal point for these worries.