(The following article by Patrick O’Connor was posted on the Hill website on August 3.)
WASHINGTON — Security experts and organizers say the Republican convention in New York presents unique challenges after last week’s relatively smooth Democratic convention in Boston.
The site, the city and the presence of a sitting president all make Madison Square Garden much more difficult to defend than FleetCenter in Boston, security experts agreed, making it a more likely target of attack.
“If a terrorist wants to influence the presidential election, then you want to target the Republican convention,” said Tim Ringgold, a retired Army colonel who helped coordinate security during the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Hank Chase, a retired naval commander who is now the director of homeland security services for ITS Corp., a government consulting firm, said, “The Republican convention is the prize because the national command structure is there.”
Chase walked the site a week ago and saw several major security concerns; he would not share the most glaring, but instead wrote to the Secret Service, which is overseeing security at the event.
Chase was most concerned with traffic flow on Seventh and Eighth avenues and said the Secret Service should stop traffic on both, something it has no plan to do. “The road is so close,” he said.
Neither the New York Police Department (NYPD) nor the Secret Service would discuss security arrangement at the convention, which will be held from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.
But some details have trickled out.
The NYPD is, for example, reportedly putting 10,000 officers through special training for the event, with a day of classroom instruction and a one-day simulation exercise in which terrorists release poison gas into a subway car.
In May, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) announced that he would close Penn Station for two to three hours during President Bush’s acceptance speech Thursday night if the Secret Service deems it necessary. The station is directly beneath the Garden, and 600,000 passengers pass through it each day.
Aside from possible temporary closure, no changes will be made in the flow of traffic in and around the Garden.
Despite their initial concerns, Chase and Ringgold said they think the NYPD will be up to the challenge. Because the subway and train tracks are deep beneath the building, a passenger bomb would be unlikely to damage it above, Chase said, but would obviously endanger passengers.
All railroad cars will be screened before entering Penn Station using external screening equipment and officers and bomb-sniffing dogs on each train as it approaches the city.
Security officials in New York and Washington were predictably coy about what effect, if any, recent terror alerts from the Department of Homeland Security would have on their planning.
“We have been preparing and training for the RNC for a year and a half,” said Michael Coan, an inspector in the NYPD’s department of public information. “We believe we will be adequately prepared.”
A Secret Service spokesman said his organization has been monitoring warnings and would add them to the overall intelligence picture. The Secret Service is in charge of national special security events, which have included conventions, the State of the Union and former President Ronald Reagan’s recent state funeral.
Planning differs for each event, said Tom Mazur, a Secret Service spokesman. Each plan accounts for terrorist attacks and protests, and seeks to limit the inconvenience to locals. Only six people were arrested during the Democratic convention, a police spokesman said, and protests were much smaller than expected.
Robert Dunford, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department, said the largest demonstration involved 3,000-5,000 people on the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Boston.