GOP requests Secret Service keep protesters far away from summer convention

The Republican National Committee asked in a letter to the Secret Service that its agents keep protesters from ruining the party’s convention July 15-18 in Milwaukee. 

Todd R. Steggerda, an attorney for the RNC, wrote that if protesters were allowed to gather near the convention center, attendees would have to pass by demonstrators, leading to conflict.

“Packing demonstrators into a park essentially boxed in by the two streets that thousands of attendees will be using to enter the convention site will only serve to heighten — rather than prevent and diffuse — any tension,” Mr. Steggerda wrote Friday. 

The current plan for protesters would let them gather in Pere Marquette Park, a quarter mile from Fiserv Forum where the RNC’s massive summer convention will be held. Two main routes leading to the arena are adjacent to the park, Mr. Steggerda noted. 

He stressed that the proximity between protesters and attendees could cause the kind of problems going on now with pro-Palestinian agitators.

“As recent college and university campus clashes make plain,” he said, “forced proximity heightens tensions among peaceful attendees and demonstrators of differing ideologies and increases the risk of escalation to verbal, or even physical, clashes.”

Mr. Steggerda suggested that the Secret Service expand its security perimeter around the convention’s downtown venues to push demonstrators farther away. 

The Secret Service said it hasn’t received the letter, The New York Times reported, but added that security plans for large-scale events like the RNC convention are “developed and approved through an executive steering committee made up of representatives from the Secret Service, as well as supporting federal, state and local agencies.”