Gov. Bill Haslam is warning that state troopers will enforce the Capitol's new curfew again tonight if Occupy Nashville protesters refuse to back down. “If we’re going to have laws, we have to enforce laws,” he said this afternoon in Knoxville where he went to a University of Tennessee trustees meeting.

The governor said he approved the decision early this morning to end the three-week occupation of Legislative Plaza to protect public safety and because of increasingly unsanitary conditions. Defending the action, he said state officials "don't really have the ability" to distinguish between law-abiding citizens exercising their First Amendment rights and street people who might have been causing trouble at the Plaza.

It was my understanding that we were going to enforce the curfew from the very beginning. In 14 hours, you should have time to decide whether you’re going to stay or not. Literally, the situation continued to deteriorate here. It’s a question of the conditions were getting worse. I keep using the word deteriorate. That was literally what was happening in this case. We don’t really have the ability to say, ‘Well, these are Occupy Nashville folks, and these are folks who have been homeless in Nashville.' We had an issue on Legislative Plaza that really did create an unsafe and unsanitary … condition.

Here's more of what Haslam said: