RENO, Nev. (KOLO) – Northern Nevada is a popular location for presidential and political campaigns, requiring heavy security. “Communication has to be a top priority in any operation we do,” Carson City Sheriff Ken Furlong said.
“Our primary job is to support the Secret Service and help them accomplish their mission of protecting the President and his associates,” Douglas County Sheriff Daniel Coverley said.
The Carson City and Douglas County Sheriff's Offices are working together to provide resources, motorcades and cordon off the site.
The Secret Service will meet with local agencies in the weeks leading up to the event to analyze the location and find known threats. “The Secret Service will identify areas that they want to control or need absolute control over, either by Secret Service agents themselves or by local police as instructed,” Coverley added.
Former President Donald Trump has appeared at Minden-Tahoe Airport twice: first as a candidate in 2016 and then as president in 2020.
“When we were doing this at the airport, there was a lot of open space for fugitives and not a lot of buildings. So securing the buildings was pretty easy for us because there weren't a lot of buildings to begin with,” Coverley said.
But Furlong said communication is key to keeping the president and the public safe. “We have a lot of officers, hundreds of officers in some cases, and there's so much scrutiny that if they don't all communicate well, the police force will fall apart,” he said.
They also implement community policing, which helps reduce law enforcement response times.
“Timing is everything in this case — how long it takes from when the call was first made to when someone responds,” Sheriff Furlong said.
“From my perspective, they were trying to figure out who this individual was, identify him and there was a delay of just a few seconds, a delay in getting on to the roof. If officers had been on the roof, this would not have happened and it would have been a different situation,” Sheriff Coverley added.
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