“It’s for security” is the repeat answer every time you try to get information that was freely available at past conventions.

 

To start with, the US Secret Service has created a double security perimeter around the Fiserve Forum where the actual convention is being held July 15-18. The larger perimeter is roughly a ten square block area that is open to pedestrians, but any vehicle entering it must be screened. The smaller perimeter is restricted to those who have convention credentials; they must enter through a security checkpoint.  You can see the security map with its boundaries online, but trying to get a paper copy you can carry with you is a study in frustration.  Even the online version downloads as a webpage.  Too small to see on a phone screen, you’d have to carry your laptop with you to see where the perimeter is and the checkpoints are located.

This is similar to the double security boundaries created around the Capitol and the White House for the 2020 inauguration, with one big difference.  In DC, streets in the outer security perimeter had concrete bulwarks. You could walk between them or carry bikes over them.  Only the inner perimeter had ten foot high fences forcing you to go to the very few checkpoints.  In Milwaukee, the outer perimeter is high fencing.  Pedestrians can only get in where cars can go, and there aren’t many of those.

 

Worst, the fencing seems to change every day.  One day you can use one route; the next you must find another.  I can see the Fiserve Forum from the AB&B where I am sleeping, but I can no longer get there from here.  Each day is an adventure (and a waste of time) trying to get from one place to another.

 

The Baird Center is where things are happening other than the actual convention meetings. It occupies two city blocks not far from the Fiserve Forum.  I was emailed to go there to pick up my pre-convention credentials – which are necessary to get into anything inside the inner security ring. But when I got there on Wednesday, no one could tell me where to go.  After three hours of being told Not Here, and escorted hither and yon, I finally found the right place in a nearby hotel.  

 

On Thursday, I took a walk to the Federal Building, which occupies an entire city block in West Milwaukee, well outside the security zone.  Nonetheless, it was surrounded with the same ten foot fences that partitioned the security zone.  I walked around the entire block looking for an opening before finally finding one on one side of the building.  It was unguarded.  

 

Once inside the fence I entered the front of the building to go through a security scrutiny that makes TSA look tame.  Items were confiscated that I could carry on an airline. (They were returned when I left).  In the atrium I saw three tables occupied by older women.  They were registering voters for the League of Women Voters. They told me that a couple dozen new citizens were taking their oaths upstairs and they hoped to register them when they descended.  I could only imagine what these new citizens thought about their new country after negotiating “security” to get into the building.

 

Even with pre-convention credentials, some places are closed.  The North building of the Baird Center is open to press.  The South Building is not.  I was turned away completely before getting my pre-convention credentials.  Once they were hanging from my neck, security let me in.  I discovered that the convention committees (Platform, Bylaws, Credentials) were meeting in that side of the Baird Center.  But they were closed to press.  Indeed on my way out, when I happened to mention to the two Security guards that I wrote for a small online magazine, they told me that I wasn’t allowed into the South building at all.  They let me in initially because I don’t look like press and they thought I was one of many volunteers 

 

Special buses will carry delegates and others with the right credentials to and from the Fiserve Forum for each of the five official meetings (one day, four nights).  Since those with press credentials can ride those buses (or so they could at past conventions), I thought it would be easier than walking late at night to take a bus to the hotel a block from where I’m staying.  But which bus?  When I asked the desk clerk at the nearby hotel which delegations were staying there, he said he couldn’t tell me.  “It’s for security,” he said.  “You understand that we have to protect people.”  That approach certainly doesn’t protect me!

 

The federal government gives each convention $75 million dollars for security.  They use part of that to feed and house police imported from all over.  This year cops are coming from 15 Wisconsin police departments, and 25 out of state PDs.  A list supplied by the Milwaukee press office lists cities mostly from Southern states – especially Florida and North Carolina. At the 2016 RNC in Cleveland, they were housed in college dorms.  Milwaukee has enough residence halls to house several thousand cops.  

 

I spoke to a group of four police sitting on very large horses, hoping to find out where they were staying.  One told me they were from Louisville, KY.  “You brought your horses?” I said. “Yes,” he replied.  "We drove them from Louisville."  “Where are you staying,” I asked.  “In the Milwaukee PD barn.” he said.  “You mean your horses are staying there.  Where are you staying?”  “With them,” he responded.  “On cots we brought with us.”

 

That’s true dedication.