U.S. Secret Service agents surround the stage during a campaign rally with Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pa.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
U.S. President Joe Biden is ordering an independent review of security after a failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump in which a gunman was able to fire multiple shots from the roof of a nearby building, a security lapse that two former RCMP officers say raises serious questions about the layers of protection afforded the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
Early accounts suggest a gunman was able to scale a rooftop, unhindered, about 140 metres from where Mr. Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler, Penn., Saturday, leading many to wonder why there was no apparent security detail present on the building in question.
“I’m shocked, quite frankly, that there wasn’t Secret Service snipers on the actual building where the shooter was – because it’s so close,” said retired RCMP inspector Chris McBryan, who was once was in charge of protective policing for the Mounties in Ontario.
The FBI has identified 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Penn., as the suspect in what it called an attempted assassination of Mr. Trump.
Secret Service agents fatally shot the suspect, the agency said, after he opened fire. An AR-15-style rifle was recovered near his body, according to sources.
The shed from which Mr. Crooks allegedly fired at Mr. Trump was outside the security perimeter set for the event, according to media reports.
But Mr. McBryan said that if that was the case, then the security perimeter was too small.
“Today, a rifle shot at 140 metres is not that long a shot,” he said.
Kevin Vickers, a former sergeant-at-arms who once helped stop an armed gunman who was attacking Parliament Hill, said it appears there was a breakdown in the second or third layers of protection at the Pennsylvania rally.
VIP security is like an onion, he said. There are layers, or zones, and potentially different groups responsible for each layer. “The closer you get to your VIP or your protected person, the tighter the skin,” said Mr. Vickers, a former RCMP chief superintendent who also worked on security for state visits to Canada.
Typically, he said, in Canada, the RCMP would be responsible for the closest zone, while in the U.S. it would be the Secret Service.
“And the farther out you go, and I would assume it’d be the same in the States, you rely on your local police and local agencies further out.”
From his perspective, “it looks like in the second or third layer there was a breakdown.”
Both Mr. McBryan and Mr. Vickers emphasized that their comments were only early impressions and that no conclusions can be drawn until a full investigation is complete.
In an interview with the BBC, a bystander described watching a man with a rifle “bear-crawling” on the roof of a building outside the rally. Police were notified but failed to stop Mr. Trump’s speech as the man remained in position for two or more minutes before opening fire, the bystander said.
Another witness provided a similar account to CBS News, saying he told a police officer at least twice about a man moving on rooftops before the shooting took place.
Mr. Vickers said one challenge for VIP security is ensuring that all members of the protective force, including local forces, are accounted for, to guard against a law enforcement officer being mistaken for a threat.
“There have been past circumstances where it’s confusing in those seconds: Is it a police officer who is part of the security detail or whatever? And, again, you can imagine the uproar on the other side of the coin if a police officer did get shot, mistakenly, by friendly fire?”
A video posted to social media and geolocated by the Associated Press showed the body of a man wearing grey camouflage lying motionless on the roof of a manufacturing plant just north of the Butler Farm Show grounds, where Mr. Trump’s rally was being held.
Mr. Vickers said the less time a security detail has to plan for an event, the greater the odds problems will arise.
“If you have six months to plan for an event, it’s wonderful. But if you have 16 hours to plan for an event, or if something changes,” he said, chances are there can be greater room for security breakdowns.
“These things flow and they have a life of their own,” he said. VIP protection details often encounter circumstances where “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”
“There’s always going to be something where there’s a hiccup, you know, something that will fall through the cracks. All you can do is do your best to limit whatever does fall through those cracks.”
With reports from Reuters and the Associated Press