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In Depth: Democratic Party Convention Security

Boston's big political party in 2004 took a lot of planning. During a six-month period, CSO followed U.S. Secret Service Special Agent Scott Sheafe as he and others developed a security plan tailored to make the best of a bad situation.

The challenges extended further out too. Not only was the country's largest-ever civil construction project going on next to the FleetCenter, but the site itself is jammed among the compact downtown Boston, two large hospitals and the spot where the Charles River spills into Boston's inner harbor. The FleetCenter is, literally, hard to get around. The proximity of Logan International Airport (just a couple of miles away) makes it difficult to secure the airspace. And, adding to the tension, the Boston Police patrolmen's union threatened to picket the conventiona dispute that wasn't resolved until several days before the convention began.

"We have a very sick patient," Sheafe said on that day in March, as though he were the doctor and the site needed treatment.

Ever since the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when antiwar protests in Chicago turned into riots, convention security has been notoriously tight. But concerns loom larger this year, especially in light of the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, which left more than 200 people dead and are thought to have influenced the country's general elections three days later.

In many ways, America's national conventionswhere the political parties celebrate their choice of presidential candidate and plan their agendas—are as important as Election Day itself. "It is a symbol of the continuity of the political system," says Thomas Patterson, a political science professor at Harvard University who has studied the role of conventions in the election process. "One of the amazing things about the American system is we've never had an interrupted presidential election. Even during the Civil War, a presidential election was held."

The conventions are a possible target for another reason too. "You're bringing together in one large place a large group of people in celebration," Patterson says. "I suppose if you were a terrorist, you'd think this an ideal target. Heaven forbid, should you be able to launch a successful attack, you'd get all the publicity that you could want, and the casualties could conceivably number in the thousands. It sort of fits the terrorist bill, both in terms of its value to us and its potential value to them."

Local politicians in Boston knew all this, of course. And despite the cheery language in the bid to host the event, they must have known that Boston presented an especially difficult set of challenges in terms of security. Perhaps they were in denial about what those measures would entail. Or perhaps they hoped that the Secret Service would come in and take the heat off them when the necessary security precautions were prescribed. But Sheafe, for his part, refused to be the fall guy. "We say, tell us what you want to do, and we'll work hard to make it safe," he said. This is how the Secret Service operates.