Who’s On First?

Here we go again. Many of you may have seen the Comedians Abbott and Costello skit of mass confusion about a baseball game. If you have never seen it, you should. It is pretty clever. We just witnessed a version of this with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. That wasn’t so funny. I want to explain why. This is not an attempt to second guess. This is an honest analysis of the information that we have now. Yes, we will learn more moving forward.

First of all, I want to qualify why I am competent to make this analysis on Presidential Protection Details. I was trained in dignitary protection by the United States Secret Service (USSS). I attended their 2-week dignitary protection program in Washington D.C. and received a certificate of completion signed by the then Director of the USSS. As the commanding officer of the Milwaukee Police Department’s Intelligence Division, we had responsibility for dignitary protection working side by side with the USSS on a directed patrol mission. I know how these details work and what should happen in a successful operation. I’m hearing many people who are being interviewed that do not know what they are talking about.

I want to start with the current leadership of the USSS and work down toward the event itself. Director Kimberly Cheatle is not qualified to lead the agents currently serving in that organization. She is an identity politics hire. She doesn’t realize that there is a culture problem within the agency. She has watered down their mission by inserting a social engineered experiment as something to be achieved. Cheatle has stated in an interview that she is committed to making sure that by 2030, she wants 30% of the agents to be female. That means more qualified males will have been passed over to achieve her goal. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs should not be part of their mission. They have one mission as it relates to their primary function-to protect high valued persons in the federal government from death or attack. They suffered a catastrophic fail in Butler, Pennsylvania. There is no way to sugar coat it. This security lapse almost cost the loss of a nominee from a major political party for President of the United States. Think about that.

What transpired after was typical of someone who doesn’t understand the moment. Cheatle started pointing the finger at the local police. She said that the USSS was not the lead agency. Like hell they aren’t. I have participated in numerous Presidential visits. The USSS is in fact the lead agency. They have to depend on a contingent of local police to accomplish the mission.  Here is how this works.  An advance team of Secret Service agents arrives in the city a few days before to do an inspection of the site. This includes mapping where the motorcade will take to the event. The advance team identifies every possible vulnerability on the route they will take plus the event location. They ask that the motorcade route be staffed with a law enforcement officer for route and site containment. The event location is swept the day before again on the day of the event. Local officers are to be in place early in the day and remain in place until the wheels up signal is given meaning the protectee or “package” as they are called now is on a plane in the air.

Now as it relates to the scene. Why the building that the shooter was able to access was not identified as a vulnerability is where a lot of finger pointing is still going on. Director Cheatle says that was not a part they were responsible for since it was outside the inner perimeter. Really? Then Cheatle said the roof was too sloped and dangerous to put a counter sniper on it. I thought the Secret Service job was to place themselves in harms way to protect in this case the former President?  The local sheriff said that they informed the Secret Service that they did not have enough personnel to post the building the shooter used. This is what pre-event meetings are supposed to resolve. I don’t care whose responsibility it is, the building needed to be posted as a vulnerability. Citizens attending the rally informed police in the areas of a guy with a rifle on the roof that the shooter eventually used. Nobody took and real action although it is reported that a local law enforcement officer went up on the roof and was confronted by the shooter who pointed his rifle at the officer who took cover and went back down the ladder. Why this wasn’t communicated to the USSS has yet to be determined.

Any of this series of interrelated events if acted upon effectively and decisively could have interrupted the assassination attempt. The shooter needed his series of events like scoping the area out several days before and even acting suspiciously at the entrance of the events with a range finder, making sure a ladder was available for him to get on the roof and counting on the directed patrol mission of protecting the former President to not take assertive action to stop him in order to succeed.

Everybody in law enforcement knows how critical seconds are to stopping a threat. The USSS and local law enforcement had not only seconds but minutes, hours and even days to prevent this. This is not second guessing. It’s stating the truth.

If the after action report follows its usual path, it will take a long time before one is released and even then, we may never find out the entire truth. In the meantime, members of Congress are already calling for hearings on what happened. You know where that is going. It is usually all theater with finger wagging and hollering at the witnesses called to testify. That circus serves no good. We need a thorough examination of what is wrong deep inside the USSS. We need structural changes and not technical fixes that over time disappear allowing the dysfunctional culture a chance to re-emerge.

With everything I have described, you can now make the comparison on what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania to the Abbott and Costello’s, Who’s on First, What’s on Second, I Don’t Know is on Third skit. It was total confusion. Add to that a lack of attention to detail and no sense of urgency and you can better understand how this happened. The only remaining question is how the USSS prevents this from happening again.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com