CHICAGO, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- Hoping to avert the kind of violence that gripped Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, the city took a number of steps in advance of Thursday's opening of the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue meeting.
Thousands of anarchists are expected to descend on the city as corporate leaders from the European Union and the United States, along with senior government officials, confer on trans-Atlantic trade policy. The meeting is being hosted by Boeing. Registration began Wednesday.
The city has assembled a special squad of 130 police officers -- all at least 6-foot-4 -- to handle demonstrators. Police have labeled the officers Special Response Teams; anti-globalization groups have dubbed them "goon squads."
"I think we should be more worried about the police instigating violence than any protesters doing it," Rocky Pyskoty, a spokesman for the TBD Planning Party, a coalition of labor and religious groups, told the Chicago Sun-Times.
The police have been training for months and flew to Washington to help with crowd control at an international trade event in September.
Protest organizers said they want to take the longest route possible for their march from Boeing headquarters southwest side of the Loop to the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, site of the summit, on the lakefront northeast of the Loop.
"It's our event. We get to say where we want to go," Darlene Gramigna of the American Friends Service Committee told the Chicago Tribune.
Illinois Green Party member Dan Johnson-Weinberger said the business meeting's participants represent corporate welfare, higher taxes, pollution and low wages for "regular" people.
The march could tie up lunch hour traffic.
Corporation counsel Mara Georges said the city will not tolerate any damage by demonstrators and will seek to recover costs.
Mayor Richard M. Daley on Wednesday imposed a parking ban in downtown Chicago and asked newspapers to remove vending boxes to prevent protesters from setting them afire or from using them to block traffic.
"People have a right to protest," Daley said. "They don't have a right to destroy property or injure anyone."
Daley has been sharply critical of the way Seattle handled its 1999 protests, saying it was the result of poor planning.
