The History of Crowd Control, and the Cleveland Convention

It would be hard to imagine a more nerve-wracking set of crowd-management circumstances than the ones coming together next week in Cleveland, where tens of thousands of people are expected to protest outside the Republican Convention. The groups signed up are an All-American trail mix, ranging from Black Lives Matter to Code Pink, to Bikers for Trump. The Republican nominee is a man who thrives on fomenting anger in the crowds who follow him. And lately some anti-Trump activists have responded in kind, roughing up Trump supporters at rallies in San Jose and Albuquerque. The Convention starts on the heels of the shooting of multiple police officers in Baton Rouge; four days after the horrific terrorist attack on a gathering of people watching Bastille Day fireworks in Nice; less than two weeks after the ambush killings of five police officers in Dallas, by a lone sniper taking advantage of a protest march; and more than two years into a civil-rights movement that has made the police shootings of unarmed black people impossible, at last, to ignore.

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