Representatives from local, state and federal law enforcement met with the media Thursday at an undisclosed Tampa Bay area site where the Multi-Agency Communications Center (MACC) is located.
Over the next week, representatives from around 60 groups with ties to the Republican National Convention, ranging from law enforcement to Amtrak to TECO to the Federal Communications Commission, will work together in the MACC. They'll be monitoring everything from traffic to protests to the weather.
Not surprisingly, security and the pending Tropical Storm Isaac were the main topics of discussion. Here are five quotes from law enforcement:
1. "The only thing predictable about these storms is the unpredictability." -- Tampa Police Chief Jane Castor
2. "The hurricane is always a possibility, so we’ve always factored that into our planning, but now that it’s actually out there spinning, it definitely gives you a little bit more of a pucker effect of ‘Okay, we might actually have to implement some of the planning that we discussed.’” -- John Joyce, Special Agent in Charge of the Tampa Office of the U.S. Secret Service on Hurricane Isaac
3. “It doesn’t change it for us, we’ll just put on raincoats. We’re going to make sure, as we have stated all along, our mission is to ensure that everyone has a safe platform on which to express themselves and that’s what we’re going to be out there doing, come rain or shine.” -- Castor on how Isaac will affect law enforcement's interaction with protestors
4. "Time will tell, I guess is the way to put it. We take all threats seriously, we look into them from start to finish, we turn over every rock out there. To say one threat is more credible than the other, I can’t say that. We look at intelligence from A-to-Z to make sure that there are no threats that are going to disrupt this RNC." -- Steven Ibison, Special Agent in Charge for Tampa Division of the FBI, on the credibility of some of the threats various anarchist groups have issued regarding the Convention.
5. “That (the evacuation of Pinellas County beaches) would, in my opinion, be the thing that forces your hand more than anything else because of the amount of people that are staying over there, and there are some threshold times that they have over there to get it done...sometime this week, maybe into the early part of the weekend, they’ll probably have to make some decisions on that.” -- Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee on when Pinellas County Emergency Management officials would have to make a decision on beachfront evacuations by. With so many delegates staying in hotels there, any such move would have serious consequences for the Convention.
