Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and Police Chief Jane Castor held a news conference Friday morning to discuss the just completed Republican National Convention. As far as the mayor was concerned, "We knocked it out of the park."
They crowed about the shocking statistic regarding the number of arrests — two.
"The key was the approach that the officers took in working with the demonstrators when possible to achieve whatever it was they were looking to accomplish," Castor told reporters at a packed press conference at City Hall. "The information that we had prior to the convention indicated that there were going to be very large numbers of demonstrators here, both in planned events and in unplanned and spontaneous events."
But the large numbers of protesters, for whatever reason, never showed up — certainly not to the extent that was mentioned in past news articles (last week CL questioned why everyone in the mainstream media was automatically citing the number of 15,000 protesters without attribution).
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2012.