Last week a professor invited me to the Cubs/White Sox interleague game at Wrigley Field this afternoon. When I had to turn him down because of a schedule conflict, he told me to “be careful this weekend.” My confused expression led him to continue on, explaining that the NATO Summit was in town. “Oh, be careful because of the protestors?” I asked. “Well, sure,” he answered, “but also because of the cops.” Chicago has a long history of ugly protests. The Haymarket Riot of 1886 began as a peaceful labor demonstration for an eight-hour day that turned ugly after a stick of dynamite was thrown at the police, killing seven. The police opened fire on the fleeing crowd, killing four and wounding somewhere around 70 others. The actual NATO Summit, held at McCormick Place, is supposed to be a sort of brain trust of various heads of state and world leaders discussing today’s issues. The 2012 Chicago summit represents the first time the summit has ever been held in the United States outside of Washington, D.C. The G8 Summit was originally scheduled to take place in Chicago directly before NATO but was moved at the last minute to the publicly inaccessible Camp David. Though President Barack Obama hasn’t explicitly said as much, many think he relocated the summit due to the many planned protests in Chicago. The protest strategy is a sound one. Hundreds of diplomats from more than 50 countries will be contained and quarantined in one convention center for the weekend, with thousands of journalists and reporters and TV crews documenting the whole thing. It’s free publicity for the protestors, whose banners and signs will now be broadcast to millions of homes across the world. Some sources say 5,000 protestors have already arrived in the city, with more ambitious estimates putting the figure around twice that. Some public schools have considered closing on Friday, 26 CTA bus routes have been modified and the entirety of the museum campus will be closed for the weekend as travel along Lake Shore Drive is restricted and monitored. The protest organizers and leaders have claimed they will lead nonviolent protests, and I suppose I have no real reason to distrust them. In the past, it has been the police who escalated conflicts to “riot” status. In 1968 Mayor Richard J. Daley gave the Chicago Police Department authority to “shoot to kill” arsonists protesting the Martin Luther King assassination, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention pitted protestors against the police in Lincoln Park, with tear gas and riot gear leading to 152 wounded officers and 500 wounded civilians. Senator Abraham Ribicoff criticized Mayor Daley for using “Gestapo tactics” of crowd control, and Daley responded in true Daley fashion by calling Ribicoff the now-famous CNN explanation of “an off-color epithet beginning with an ‘F.'” Chicago’s current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who celebrated his one-year mayoral anniversary Wednesday, has responded to the threat of protests by ordering heightened security for the summit. An MSNBC story reads “Chicago braces for violence” as if violence were a foregone conclusion. The city recently ordered $200,000 worth of face shields that fit over the police officers’ riot helmets, and select officers are receiving specific training for the new “sound cannons” that will be implemented for crowd control. The MSNBC report quotes an Occupy representative, who quips “The police are the ones armed to the teeth. We carry signs and beat drums.” Emanuel has been unusually harsh on protestors during his tenure, arresting Occupy Chicago protestors who had camped out in Grant Park in October. The Occupy movement, which was allowed to camp out in public parks in other U.S. cities, were told they were breaking a decades-old Chicago law by camping out in the public parks between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. The ACLU and Amnesty International have already responded to Emanuel’s new measures, which also allow him to deploy an unlimited number of surveillance cameras throughout the city and requiring “parades” to purchase a $1 million “insurance policy” with criticism, claiming the cameras are unlawful and the “insurance policy” effectively makes any protests (here labeled as colorful “parades”) without big-budget backing impossible. There is a chance I’m wrong about all of this. There is a chance the protests turn violent and our city becomes a state of emergency for the weekend, the Bean in Millennium Park reflecting the skyline aflame on its glossy, mirrored surface. My gut, though, is telling me that Emanuel is overreacting. He’s letting the horrors of the past get ahead of him. For someone who has resembled the second mayor Daley for much of his first year in office, working on beautifying the city and cutting pork barrel spending and being a generally fair and good mayor, he suddenly looks a lot more like The Boss. Dan Camponovo is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at danielcamponovo2012@u.northwestern.edu