Bob CollinsLast summer, I covered an event outside the Xcel Energy Center in which the top brass of area law enforcement announced they had a deal for enough cops for the Republican National Convention.
Here’s the image I took of the event.
You’ll have to take my word for it that Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher wasn’t there and it wasn’t until I heard MPR reporter Laura Yuen’s story on Thursday that I took notice of that.
Chief John Harrington and Fletcher, according to Laura’s story, were clashing around the time over how many cops would be needed and what form of presence they’d assume.
He said while the public may have been surprised by the intensity of police presence downtown, it’s probably because residents paid attention to early assurances from the department that anarchists would not be causing safety problems — assurances that, as it turned out, were based on faulty intelligence.
Still unclear, however, is who was in charge during the Republican National Convention?
In the second part of Yuen’s series this afternoon, Fletcher says he had nothing to do with the most controversial aspects of the RNC police actions, Harrington will say it was Fletcher’s department who took the lead in investigations that led to the pre-RNC raids.
