Mr. Griffin. Do you have any suggestions that you would make as to how, as a result of your experience, you think the President might be more effectively protected?
Chief Batchelor. I don't know how you would correct this exactly. One of the problems that we experienced was the fact that such, of such a short time to do some of the planning that we had.
We didn't know until just one afternoon, actually, in terms of Love Field security, actually where the President's plane would be placed.
We didn't know until 2 days before his arrival what the parade route would be. This posed some problem in terms of assignment of personnel and properly instructing personnel as to what their procedures should be.
I think one thing that would be helpful would be for a standard general procedure of things that those responsible for protection of the President could put out to police departments such as certain standard types of coverage that would always apply.
Mr. Griffin. Can you give us any example from your own experience where this would have been useful on this unfortunate trip?
Chief Batchelor. One thing you need in a situation like this is explicit written instructions to officers as to such things as watching the crowd rather than the President.
This is a general accepted thing in most police departments.
Sometimes you have new personnel that comes in and they need to be told this specifically. We had an instance in which we were asked to guard all of the overpasses, railroad and vehicular, and we instructed the officers verbally that they were to let no unauthorized personnel on these overpasses. But there was no definition of what "authorized personnel" was.
And in one case, there were people on an overpass which the President had never reached.