KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A former Secret Service agent and a security expert provided analysis Monday on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
The assassination attempt Saturday against the former president raised troubling questions about security at the campaign event.
“This is probably the worst day that could happen,” said David Stutheit, a former Secret Service agent and now Chief Security Officer for the Johnson County Sheriff's Department. “You had an event, you had an attack on a protectee.”
Stutheit spent 27 years with the Secret Service and never dealt with assassination attempt.
“It's generational,” he said. “I mean, my generation that went through the Secret Service, we kind of went unfazed.”
But the same rules of protection applied then as they do now.
“You’ve got to be able to make quick decisions on your feet, you’ve got to be able to react quickly and it’s a special person that takes up that mission, it really is,” Stutheit said.
When he applied his own lens to Saturday’s event, he empathizes with those on duty when the assassination attempt happened.
“I've always said, you know, Secret Service has a zero-fail mission, and we failed,” Stutheit said. “You know, somebody lost their life, that's not right. What do you do at that point? I mean, that's not good.”
Security expert Vaughn Baker’s workload only increases in a time like this.
“Any time something major happens, an act of violence or mass violence, our phone rings and our website traffic goes up,” Baker, the president, CEO and co-founder of Strategos International said.
His organization provides security training and services.
“I wish it wasn’t the case," Baker said. "We wish there wasn’t a need for those services, but that’s just human nature. People call when something like this happens.”
Both Baker and Stutheit say there are distinct differences between securing indoor and outdoor events.
An outdoor event is considered a "quick" operation.
“If we’re looking at the Milwaukee RNC convention, they started that almost two years ago, planning that event,” Baker said. “So it does take a significant amount of resources, lots of resources, whether human resources or physical resources to pull something like that off. Imagine though, in comparing that to a rally that occurred. Those things happen very quickly, they put those together with maybe 30 days notice, and that’s a big ask to secure an area that maybe isn’t designed to be secured. The RNC convention, on an inside location, that’s easier to secure than where a lot of these rallies take place.”
Baker also encourages people to have their own event plan in place with families or loved ones in case of danger.
He says it’s important to analyze the attacker’s behavior as much those who respond to an incident.
“It is a lot of pressure, because you have to be right 100% of the time. The attacker has to be right only once,” Baker said.
As for what’s next, Stutheit says beyond additional training for officers, it’s accountability.
“Maybe they didn't take certain things into account they should have and that's a tough one,” Stutheit said. “That'll be found. This is going to be investigated. They'll sort all this out.”
There's one question still unanswered.
"Everybody’s gonna be interviewed, everybody’s gonna be talked to, but there’s also gonna be that, ‘How did this happen?’"
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KSHB 41 reporter Rachel Henderson covers issues in Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties. You can email her story ideas at rachel.henderson@kshb.com.