Miami Battens Down

Many residents plan to flee town.

Some storeowners are going to board up their windows. A battalion of National Guardsmen has canceled summer maneuvers to remain on stand-by call. Doctors, fearing the worst, have called for increased ambulance service and emergency supplies of drugs, cots, chairs, tables, tents, huts, trailers and walkie-talkies. One survival-minded citizens' group, The Miami Snowplow Co., requested $1.7 million worth of canned beef stew, a $1,632 stockpile of disposable diapers and bottles, 1,000 containers of aspirin, 500 instant ice packs and one medium-transport helicopter--but failed to survive as an organization through lack of support. The scene is Miami Beach, and the preparations are not for a hurricane but for those grand old American blowouts, the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

The prospective influx of the "street people"--estimates range from 5,000 to 100,000, plus 50,000 conventioneers--scares many residents. Memories of the bloody riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago have made the graying Miami Beach citizens (median age: 65) more than a little jittery. Fortunately, the coolest heads belong to those most directly involved in keeping the peace. The coolest of all is Police Chief Rocky Pomerance, a big (270 lb.), bright, benign bruiser who preaches that "the police do not have to be an abrasive force." For the moment, at least, Rocky's spirit of cooperation is matched by the leaders of the Youth International Party (YIP), the chief coordinators for the dozen or more radical groups massing for what one of their flyers calls "peaceful direct action beneath the summer sun of blue-watered Miami Beach." Yippie leaders have set up their mimeograph machines in a posh five-room suite two blocks from the Miami Beach Auditorium and Convention Hall. After several strategy sessions with Pomerance and his staff, Yippie Organizer Jeff Nightbyrd says: "You know, during all this planning I don't think I heard the word 'pig' one time. We all call them cops around here."

Not that everything is going smoothly. YIP, for example, turned down the city's offer of two demonstration sites, the first because it was too small and the second because it was in the middle of an old folks' section. "Can you imagine what would happen if there was massive tear gassing?" says Nightbyrd. "Those old people can't run, and some of them would die." Eventually, Pomerance set aside two grassy areas in front of the convention hall for demonstrations. A believer in "maximum security with minimum visibility," Pomerance arranged for the fences around the demonstration grounds to be decorated with hibiscus bushes.

Members of the intransigent Miami Beach City Council have suggested that the kids either cut their hair or go home. One organization calling itself Operation Backbone is against granting any public facilities to "hippies, yippies or zippies." Before its efforts ground to a stop, The Miami Snowplow worried in a letter to the Miami Herald: "If an uninvited guest has nowhere to go to the bathroom because no one thought to set up portable toilets, then he will go to the bathroom in our parks or waters."

Yippies warn that the lack of adequate camping and demonstration sites could cause trouble. "If they get real hard-nosed about it," says Nightbyrd, "they'll create a situation where we'll come in with 10,000 seasoned street fighters with helmets and gas masks." In return, the city is preparing for all contingencies. The Miami Orioles baseball team has been evicted from Miami Stadium so that it can handle billeting of troops and/or "uninvited guests" who will not fit into the jails. There has even been talk of blockading the five Miami Beach causeways as a last-ditch, so to speak, security measure.

Rocky Pomerance, who plays down the "show-of-force" factor, dismisses the talk about impending troubles. Propping one modishly booted foot on his teak desk, he explains: "I don't see the pressures that existed in 1968. They've greatly expanded the parameters of participation with the 18-year-old vote and the McGovern rules, and that takes some of the pressure off. I think violence as a political tool has peaked and the kids know it's counterproductive."

The professorial ring to Pomerance's utterances is no put-on. A pipe-puffing devotee of antiques, rare books, opera, ballet and classical music as well as boxing and pro football, he is preparing his 250-man force for the convention crush by requiring that each officer take a special 96-hour training course at Florida International University. For the past five months the cops have been studying such heady subjects as the "history and contemporary modes of dissent" and "the philosophical foundations of the Bill of Rights, with emphasis on the First Amendment." Says Rocky, who has studied off and on at both the City College of New York and the University of Miami, "I want my men to know why we must protect a citizen's right to protest. They are learning the psychology of crowd control and their role in the process. They are being told how important it is to their country that they act in a fair, humane manner."

Pomerance has staged sensitivity sessions between cops and longhairs. In one instance, a shaggy youth wearing a Viet Cong button caused one cop to walk out of the session. "Wait a minute!" yelled a fellow officer. "If you can't take this kid, how you gonna stay cool in July?" The cop returned.

Working on the theory that "maybe nonviolence begets nonviolence," Pomerance is toying with the idea of deploying his front-line men without guns or even helmets. "Maybe," he says, "the soft hat will have a more friendly effect than a hard hat." Of the coming confrontations he concludes: "It's all a question of attitudes. We're working on ours. I hope they're working on theirs."

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