No. of Recommendations: 6
The Secret Service had a counter sniper team inside.
My understanding is that was a local police sniper team. And they were inside because, unlike the Secret Service, they had a problem with safety on sloped roofs. There's also some claims that one of these buildings was being used as sort of a security headquarters for the event.
But there's inconsistencies with even that. What I heard is that this mystery sniper team was on the second floor of a building. The building that the shooter was on doesn't seem to have a second floor - or at least no second floor windows. But a building behind the shooter's building DOES have windows on a second floor. And those windows have a good view of the roof where the shooter set up.
So where was this sniper team? Better yet, where were all of the sniper locations? Publicly, we only know about one - the one on top of the building behind the stage.
The reality here is that this is a former President and a current Presidential candidate. While those people get secret service protection, they do not get the same number of assets that the sitting President gets. And it's probably an order of magnitude less.
Secret Service personnel are quite stretched at this moment in time. They're handling Biden's current needs. They're preparing for the convention in Milwaukee. I'm not sure if Trump had another rally planned after Butler and before the convention. If so, there's more personnel there. There's the advance planning for Chicago in a couple of weeks. There's simply a lot going on at the moment.
In aviation, there's the "swiss cheese" model of safety. It all starts with the premise that you know that people are human and mistakes will be made. There are holes in the cheese. You can't avoid that. So you have multiple layers of protection to maintain safety. You use multiple "slices of cheese" so that an error at one point has a good likelihood of being spotted and corrected at a different point. The holes in the swiss cheese don't line up. It's only when there are multiple failures that the holes do line up and something bad happens.
That's very likely what happened here. It's going to be multiple errors, multiple holes in the security plan that aligned and let a shooter get through. The Secret Service has a lot on their plate at this time. They always have to rely on local police for some part of the security plan. There needs to be clear and quick lines of communication between the different agencies (Secret Service, state police, and city or county police in this specific situation). There needs to be pre-event training - where different people and agencies will be, what their uniforms look like, who is responsible for what, who to contact in the different agencies. There needs to be communication of last minute changes - the snipers will be here and not there, state police are manning this sniper post and not the secret service, things like that. None of these things should be problem on their own, but when you get a couple of them at the same time, the odds for a simple error becoming a big problem increase.
Like I said very early on, it's going to take a thorough investigation to find the real sources of the problem. Yes, plural. It's not going to be any one specific thing. We want to be able to quickly point a finger and blame this person or that organization. But life is complex and rarely are such simple answers to complicated questions correct or useful. Firing people or blaming organizations right now is not going to do anything other than appease our lust for revenge and retribution. If we want to make future events safer, we must dig into the complexity and find the chain of events that led to a shooter actually firing off multiple rounds.
--Peter
