After a week of lapses and blunders, officers protecting former President Donald J. Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, still had one last chance to get it right. The opportunity lasted about 30 seconds.
It began when a local police officer looked out onto the roof of the AGR International warehouse near the rally site and found the suspicious man he and other officers were pursuing. Ninety minutes of confusion over Thomas Crooks’ intentions and whereabouts had ended in an instant.
“Long gun!” the agent transmitted over the local law enforcement radio system, the Secret Service told Congress this week.
It was urgent news that should have traveled instantly to a command center shared by local police and the Secret Service, and then to agents close enough to dump their bodies in front of Mr. Trump. They still had time to thwart an assassination attempt.
But the radio message never reached the Secret Service, and 30 seconds later Mr. Crooks unleashed his first shots.
That communication failure was one of several instances in which technologies that could have protected Trump from the July 13 shooting failed to do so — either because they malfunctioned, were deployed improperly or because the Secret Service chose not to use them.
The Secret Service, for example, turned down offers to use a surveillance drone at the Butler Farm Show rally site. The agency also failed to bring a system to boost the signals on agents’ devices in an area with poor cellphone service. And some of the equipment the agency did bring, including a system to detect drone use by others, failed to work when it was most needed.
The result was that a 20-year-old gunman had a technological advantage over a $3 billion federal agency.
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. told Senate lawmakers at a hearing this week that the agency had tools that could have detected Mr. Crooks and allowed agents to question him before the shooting, but failed to use them properly.
“That has cost me many hours of sleep,” Mr. Rowe testified. “It’s something that I’ve had a hard time understanding, and I have no – I have no explanation for it.”
Mr. Trump was wounded in the shooting, as were three rally attendees, one of them fatally, in one of the biggest Secret Service failures in decades. Mr. Rowe, in his testimony, said he could not understand why the Secret Service decided to exclude from its security perimeter the warehouse that Mr. Crooks used, about 450 feet from Mr. Trump’s lectern, and why no countersniper was assigned to its roof.
But the problems were about more than just strategic mistakes in how to deploy law enforcement personnel. Current and former Secret Service and federal government officials acknowledged in interviews that the agency has long struggled to quickly incorporate technology that can aid its mission.
“We live in 2024,” said Mike Matranga, a former Secret Service officer who now runs his own security firm that helps protect many schools and businesses with law enforcement tools. “Why is the government the last to be able to develop and offer technology to its benefit?”
The presence of technology alone does not guarantee the security of the protected person, but it can be a vital backup in a time of heightened polarization and overt political violence. And it is even more important when Secret Service personnel are stretched thin by the intense demands of a presidential election.
Government audits going back decades have criticized the Secret Service for being slow to adopt the technology, appearing to rely on a 1950s model in which armed agents use their own weapons and, if necessary, their bodies to protect presidents and other high-profile figures.
Nine years ago, after gunshots rang out near the home of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Jason Chaffetz, who was chairman of the House Oversight Committee that year, immediately demanded to see the footage.
But the then-Secret Service director showed up at a meeting with Chaffetz empty-handed.
“He came in timidly and said, ‘We don’t have cameras,'” Chaffetz said in an interview. That year, Mr. Chaffetz’s commission issued a scathing report saying the agency needed urgent reform.
Money, or at least how it is allocated, has been a factor. Congress has steadily increased the Secret Service budget over the past decade to $3.1 billion this year, up from about $2.3 billion in 2014, in inflation-adjusted dollars.
But budget documents show the agency spends only about $4 million a year — less than 1 percent of its funding — on research and development of new security tools and other needs. For next year, the agency has asked Congress to allocate far less funding for research — just $2.2 million.
The Secret Service did not respond to questions about its spending on security technology.
It can take years for the agency to evaluate new technology and get the authorization and funding to acquire it, and even longer to train staff on how to use it, said Chris DeMunbrun, a former Secret Service official who resigned in 2017 after growing frustrated with the agency’s lack of progress in adopting new tools.
In addition, civil liberties concerns have prevented the agency from widely deploying facial recognition software, although it is routinely used in private venues such as casinos. The software could help the agency quickly identify people who are known threats, although this would not have helped with Mr. Crooks, since he had not previously been identified as a concern.
According to Matranga and other former officers, the agency has been slow to adopt less controversial tools, such as rooftop drones that could be used by a sniper, backing up police personnel assigned to the task.
Several companies sell software that takes video images from security cameras and identifies any exposed weapons within seconds, an application currently being used at places like Chicago’s Navy Pier.
“These situations are incredibly complicated,” said Sam Alaimo, a former Navy Seal and co-founder of ZeroEyes, a company with hundreds of customers, including the Pentagon, which has tested using the software on drones. “But we built our system to pick up the weapon before the first shot is fired.”
The Secret Service shamefully failed to properly use a technology at its disposal at the rally.
Mr. Rowe acknowledged during the Senate hearing that the agency did not successfully deploy anti-drone technology at the time Mr. Crooks launched a drone there. Such systems, now widely used at large public events like the Super Bowl, typically use radio-frequency sensors, cameras and radar to track unauthorized drones in the air. More advanced systems can even jam radio signals, effectively disabling them.
The Secret Service had planned to deploy an anti-drone system beginning early in the afternoon on July 13, Rowe said. But as thousands of people gathered at the rural site, the communications network on which the device relied was overwhelmed. The system was offline when Mr. Crooks flew his own small drone over the site for 11 minutes undetected, about two hours before Mr. Trump took the stage.
Compounding the error, the agency had not set up a mobile communications system, nor installed satellite Internet service units, to overcome the bandwidth problem.
Had the system been operational, the Secret Service likely would have immediately detected Mr. Crooks, as these systems can pinpoint the location of a person piloting an unauthorized drone.
“We could have stopped him, perhaps, on that particular day,” Mr. Rowe testified. “He would have decided, ‘This is not the day to do it because law enforcement just found me flying my drone.'”
The Secret Service did not have its own surveillance drone at the rally and declined an offer from local law enforcement to use one of its systems, Mr. Rowe said at the hearing. The device could have spied on Mr. Crooks when he first climbed onto the roof, before he was in position to fire.
“We probably should have taken them at their word,” Mr Rowe said.
Perhaps the most tragic failure related to technology was the failure to quickly convey the message that Mr. Crooks had a firearm.
“Local law enforcement in Butler told my team that they had no way to communicate directly with the Secret Service,” Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters told Rowe during this week’s hearing. That’s because they were communicating on different radio systems.
Since at least 2001, when a lack of interoperability among emergency response teams contributed to the deaths of more than 100 firefighters who remained in one of the World Trade Center towers even after the first one had collapsed, the federal government has been working to address the problem.
At the Butler rally, the Secret Service thought it had a solution to the persistent obstacle. As usual, the agency planned to rely on a command center where urgent threats heard on different radio frequencies could be shared verbally and relayed to Mr. Trump’s security team. But this command center system also failed.
“It appears that information was stuck or isolated in that state and local channel,” Mr. Rowe said. “Nothing about the man on the roof, nothing about the gunman. None of that information made it to our network.”
Even the investigation into the assassination attempt itself will be hampered by technological glitches. The Secret Service did not record much of the radio communication between certain federal and local law enforcement officials at the rally.
“Very unfortunate,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said at a Senate hearing this week.
“It is, sir,” Mr. Rowe replied, adding that the agency would now record these radio calls “so that we can have them available in the future.”
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