Daley's Defense

At his first press conference after the battle of Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley was gruff and to the point. "Gentlemen," he said last week, thrusting his jaw out for angry emphasis, "get this thing straight for once and for all. The policeman isn't there to create dis order. The policeman is there to pre serve disorder."

It was, of course, a verbal slip by a man famous for his bouts with the lan guage. Yet it said perhaps more than the mayor intended. Despite a 77-page official "white paper" and a blanket endorsement of his police by Daley him self, city authorities had yet to convince thousands who were there that the Chicago cops had been anything less than brutal to demonstrators, news men and almost anyone else who got in their way during the four days of the Democratic Convention.

Like the city's official accounting, Daley's 25-minute, press-conference defense bore only slight resemblance to the events. Sometimes the mayor just got the facts wrong. He told reporters, for example, that they "forgot entirely that the confrontation was not created by police. The confrontation was created by people who charged police." There was no such charge by demonstrators during the most notorious confrontation in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. At other times, the mayor magnified incidents to bolster his case. What would they do, he asked reporters, if someone tried to blind the man standing next to them by hurling oven cleaner? Though oven cleaner may have been used as a weapon by a few protesters, it was not the standard equipment that Daley and others implied. By the police department's own count, only five of 198 injuries to police could have been caused by spray in the face.

Daley left out entirely anything that tended to discredit his police. While conceding reluctantly that police work, like any other human enterprise, can be improved, he stubbornly maintained that the police operations had been nothing short of "magnificent."

The Toll. Judging from letters that continued to flood newspapers and TV stations, many around the country agreed. Most of the evidence, which continued to come in during the week, pointed the other way. The Medical Committee for Human Rights said that more than 1,000 civilians required medical treatment as a result of police action. The city report had counted 60.

One of the most poignant cases was reported by Chicago's American, which has been generally sympathetic to the police. Hoping to find his runaway son among the yippies, Wilhelm Vill, 59, an immigrant steelworker from Estonia, asked two policemen in Lincoln Park for help. Before he could finish telling them about his son, Vill said, they approached him with their billy clubs ready. While one grabbed his arm, the other asked: "What do you want, you rotten bum?" Taken to the station house, Vill, a nondrinker, was booked on charges of drunkenness and disorderly conduct.

The charges were dismissed in court last week, but Vill's anger remained. "Shame on him, that police," he said. "I am scared now to turn to police. Now where we turn when we need help? We need better order for the human being."

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