by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
For the men in uniform, Super Bowl Sunday will present the greatest challenge of their career.
That’s true on and off the field, as more than 1,300 Jacksonville Sheriff’s officers prepare to keep the peace among 150,000 hard partying fans preparing to descend on downtown as the Feb. 6 game nears.
The JSO will have 935 officers patrolling downtown in addition to the usual weekend force of 400 on regular weekend duty. Add to that a private security force of more than 3,000 and more than 40 State and federal agencies and it’s clear that Jacksonville has prepared a Super Bowl defense of its own.
“We’re ramped up and ready to go,” said Bill David, assistant chief for special events with the JSO.
David has been helping assemble the JSO game plan for more than a year including a scouting trip of sorts to last year’s game in Houston. JSO will use some of the same methods to coordinate local efforts with the NFL and out-of-town forces.
One key difference? David got to go to the game last year.
“We said last year that we’d better have our fun now because we sure won’t have any next year. We were right,” said David.
Always an enormous undertaking, providing security for the Super Bowl has become even more complicated since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Security now has to prepare on two fronts.
First, keep one of the world’s largest single-day parties secure. Second, defend one of the most inviting terrorist targets.
With help from State and federal specialists the game should be secure from attack, David said. Another concern occupies the top of his list.
“The ‘T’ word I worry about is not ‘terrorism,’ it’s ‘traffic,” he said.
Parking will be hard to come by and people looking for spaces downtown do so at their own risk, he said. Look for lots with the official Super Bowl logo, David said, as those vendors have agreed to keep their rates within limits set by the NFL.
David also encouraged people to take advantage of the City’s public transportation. He said the Skyway could be made part of the family fun.
“Take your kids on the Skyway, nobody else rides it. They’ll think they’re at Walt Disney World,” he said.
The JSO is preparing for some very specific types of crime that travels with the Super Bowl. Officers will be patrolling with ticket scanners, searching for counterfeits and scalpers. Pickpockets are another unfortunate byproduct of the game, but it’s not all bad, said David.
“Everybody I’ve talked to from other cities says we’ll be seeing a much higher class of hooker,” he said.
Just about everybody working for the JSO will be working in some capacity this weekend. Most of the officers are excited, particularly the ones working security at the Playboy party, he said. But not everyone was happy about working during the game.
“I tell them like this. Tom Hanks said in a movie that ‘There’s no crying in baseball?’ Well, I tell them there’s no whining at the Super Bowl,” he said.