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Events will test NYC's security skills

NEW YORK (AP) -- The U.S. Open tennis tournament. Home games for the Mets and Yankees. The start of a massive celebration by Caribbean immigrants.

And then there's the matter of the Republican National Convention.

The pileup of events in the city next week will add to the security challenge for the New York Police Department, but commissioner Ray Kelly says, "With a big, experienced police force, we can do it."

Kelly spoke Monday at police headquarters as he and Mayor Michael Bloomberg met with Jewish leaders to outline security measures for the upcoming Jewish religious holidays, and for the confluence of other events preceding them.

The police commissioner said "virtually the entire department" will be mobilized throughout the city next week -- in midtown at Madison Square Garden, site of the Republican convention; at Yankee stadium in the Bronx and at Shea Stadium and the nearby U.S. Tennis Center in Queens. Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, the 36,500-member department has deployed scores of uniformed and plainclothes officers at each home game of the city's two baseball teams.

Security also will be tight at the U.S. Open, where matches begin on August 30, the same day the convention opens. A festival in Brooklyn that starts the day after the convention ends and culminates in the West Indian Day parade on September 6. is expected to draw a large number of spectators and hundreds of police officers.

The department has taken a show-of-force approach to the convention. Up to 10,000 officers will flood the streets and subways around Madison Square Garden and elsewhere. On Monday, uniformed police officers were posted throughout Pennsylvania Station and still more officers guarded entrances above ground.

Police expect up to 250,000 anti-war demonstrators to march on Sunday, the eve of the convention. They also believe protesters will take to the streets on the night of September 2, when President Bush accepts his party's nomination.