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Susan Crabtree on Secret Service policy. Some of this could be based on candidate fear of political blowback, if an innocent gets killed.

[Here’s my reporting on why the Secret Service did not shoot until AFTER the shooter engaged and some context about the House Republicans’ investigation already underway (months before Trump’s assassination attempt) into whether the agency’s DEI policies are affecting its readiness.

The blowback against the Secret Service started within the hour of the assassination attempt and continued even after Trump and other credited the agency with saving Trump’s life by quickly killing a shooter crawling across a nearby rooftop.

But a source within the Secret Service community tells RealClearPolitics that the agency rules of engagement in this situation are to wait until the president is fired upon to return fire.

“You want to take a shot then find out the guy was holding a telescope?” the source suggested. “The Secret Service is by nature reactive…and you better be right when you do react or you’re f-——d.”

The Secret Service protocol requires that a counter sniper aware of a potential shooter to radio directly to intelligence division team to respond and investigate. In this case, the investigation may have been cut short by the shooter firing his weapon, so the counter sniper then fired as quickly as possible in return.

The source praised the counter sniper who acquired the target and responded within three seconds, calling their performance “incredible.”

“The counter snipers are highly trained and extremely accurate,” he said.]

From the cop’s standpoint, it makes sense. Thanks to Floyd, we’ve seen a violent felon’s death from drug overdose send four cops to prison for multiple decades each, while sending their families into bankruptcy. Putting a civilian down who turned out not to be an assassin could have catastrophic personal consequences. Qualified immunity is not a theoretical issue to a police sniper, given the generally lethal or catastrophically injurious nature of what they are tasked with doing.

I figured that was the case and the applicable ROE. But the guy is in a restricted/secured area, lying prone, aiming a rifle at the President and the officer is tracking him with a high power scope. Those four strikes justified blowing him to bits BEFORE he fired. Is there no common sense anywhere?

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I figured that was the case and the applicable ROE. But the guy is in a restricted/secured area, lying prone, aiming a rifle at the President and the officer is tracking him with a high power scope. Those four strikes justified blowing him to bits BEFORE he fired. Is there no common sense anywhere?