Security recruiting for the Republican convention is beginning to sound like a bad scene ready to happen. Small-town deputies, volunteering to flush out the forces, bring to mind Marge Gunderson, the pregnant cop out of "Fargo" film fame.
 
Visualize another image ... like a few overtly ambitious sheriff's deputies who traditionally patrol Main Street, Minnesota — towns consisting of one cafe and four grain elevators beside a railroad long abandoned and covered with weeds. Bored cops may assume they are about to experience their day-of-infamy rounding up protesters — something they rarely saw or ever allowed in the dusty history of their village, population 400-1,000.

Anybody want to write another bloody film script for this scenario?

Searching for enough boys-in-blue bodies from across the state is about as credible as riding a grain truck down St. Paul streets, sans brakes. Picture small authority figures up against bigger authority figures, small powers bowing to greater powers, St. Paul cops ... all to be programmed in less than a month?

Does anyone give up power easily, however limited? Will outstate cops conform dutifully to St. Paul's finest? Will this create a secondary area of dissent to be concerned about?
 
Speculate also: Who will be sufficiently guarding the "general" store — or robbing it while small-town police are working the convention crowds?
 
Add the latest murmurings — the possibility of using police volunteers from other states. Does that include Southern sheriffs?
 
Is there an alternative, secondary security force to control the security forces? This could stir up one fine kettle of logistics, and but a month away.

If the St. Paul Police force can put together a working security crowd, to control the other crowds and make it function smoothly without any unexpected tragic incidents, then certainly they will have lived up to their name as St. Paul's saints. They will have earned their wings, blue indeed.
 
The Blackwater boys haven't been recruited yet, or have they?
 
Beryl Knudson is a writer from Duluth.

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