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I think this article that lists five different times the Secret Service had major security lapses since 2012 is also worth reading
My theory is that Trump was getting the best security the Secret Service can give, and they're just really bad at their jobs for some reason
Is it just that it's a really fucking hard job? How do you protect someone who wants to travel the country and stand in front of live audiences of thousands of people, without getting in the way of the personal experience they are trying to sell?
If you are as controversial as Trump, anyone can be an assassin and the secret service have to somehow separate crazy fan from crazy assassin, in a thousand different venues. The only real option is a bulletproof Popemobile.
I mean, I definitely wouldn't want to do their job (and Trump with his thing for rallies is probably extra tough), but I don't think the drunk driving crashes and visiting sex workers while traveling overseas with the President helps
Yeah, I'll give you that one. I'm assuming there's a super tough process to be selected for the secret service, like an astronaut selection process? But maybe I'm assuming wrong.
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev made a really good comment here that I think starts to answer this
I could see something like - someone is the best of the best, gets selected for a very prestigious Secret Service posting, then nothing happens and they just have to pick up dry cleaning and watch the fanciest and most pretentious people in the world attend cocktail parties for several years, and eventually they end up visiting sex workers and drinking on duty and things like that
That's a really good point, it must be hard keeping them on top of their game.
I am not in security, but I have worked in secure areas. The way you prevent issues is having multiple layers of security that watch each other.
Like you prevent individual employees from committing fraud by having other employees sign off on their work. Then you prevent those employees from colluding to commit fraud by having another group of employees monitor their actions. Finally a third group of employees audits everyone occasionally (at random).
This way it requires at least 4 people who don't know each other to do anything illegal. I'm sure the Secret Service could do with some audits. Like literally have an entire team of Secret Service people test them, trying to trick them into making a mistake.
Somewhat unrelated topic, but this is why driving is so dangerous at a population level. Most of the time, nothing happens even if you take a bunch of risks. But if enough risks occur at the same time, people die (Swiss cheese model).
I think most secret service are ex military, often special ops. Former SEALS, etc.
You tend to get a certain kind of personality with that kind of experience. So you have to accept a little bit of risk with after hour entertainment.
To get assigned to protect a president? Yes, that's a pretty tough selection process. The Secret Service has other responsibilities, though. Presidential protection details are just one possible assignment. It just happens to be the most high profile and prestigious assignment. But they were actually chartered as a law-enforcement/intelligence branch of the Department of the Treasury, so they also investigate a range of financial crimes, including (but not limited to) forgery, counterfeiting, wire fraud, etc. At the time that it was decided the president needed constant protection (after McKinley was assassinated in 1901), the FBI didn't exist yet, or else they might have gotten the job.
Someone reported the shooter 3 minutes before the first shots were fired.
"Follow up on suspicious reports" doesn't sound like it's a very hard part of the job.
"There's a shooter in the stadium somewhere, find them in the next 3 minutes" actually sounds like a really hard job.
Yeah, but we don't know how often they get false reports. I think from now on the security approach will probably change.
This is so good.
They pointed to the guy on the roof...
I honestly think you're underestimating how hard this is. 3 minutes is probably not enough time to get to the roof let alone find him if he moved.
It's not that hard to pull Trump from the stage until they had time to assess threat.
They had snipers set up on the other roofs. Turn and look when you get the radio call.
All the more reason to not be concerned when someone reports a gunman on the roof?
"There's a shooter in the stadium, get Trump off the stage" is really fucking easy.
Yeah like you are getting tRump off a stage while he is ranting with just one report
Yes, you do. You push him off, he doesn't get a say in it. Nevermind that he probably would want to, he doesn't want to get shot.
Abusing that system to silence him would be super easy.
It wasn't clear from the Trump-visor guy that he actually reported anything, just yelled and pointed and assumed they'd pick up on it. What the security actually saw and heard is another question. Maybe if you see a suspected assassin coming for your godking, it's important enough to actually leave your seat and talk to someone directly.
Right? They were directly told and chose to ignore it.
It's a "hard job," yet they were literally informed about the shooter crawling to location and ignored it. Seems like incompetence at minimum
My guess is that most of his SS agents are chosen because they're loyalists, not because of any particular skill.
This was also true in the 1930s, funny how history repeats.
If they don't want to be called SS, maybe they should stop protecting a Hitler wannabe
I imagine it’s just incredibly difficult to take your job super seriously when any given thing only happens like once every 5-10 years, and probably not to you. I imagine most secret service people who are doing security spend 100% of their careers just standing around and then retire with nothing having happened.
At one point, US embassy security details had this problem, and what they settled on was rotating active-duty combat troops in straight from the field so they were super alert. After about 6 months they would start to relax, and they would rotate them out and have fresh people.
I won’t claim to know what the answer is for the SS but clearly there are some issues with the way they’re doing it.