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Interviewee says he saw the guy on a roof and reported him: https://x.com/SharpFootball/status/1812265909727396107
I watched that and his disbelief that Secret Service didn't have those roofs covered. I'm assuming Trump has a much smaller SS detail than he would have had while he was president, right? I understand that former presidents and presidential campaigners get some degree of SS coverage, but is their detail really big enough to station agents on all of the roofs in a small town, like this guy seems to have expected?
https://apnews.com/article/trump-vp-vance-rubio-7c7ba6b99b5f38d2d840ed95b2fdc3e5
According to this (and the "all clear" in the video), they killed the shooter in seconds. I guess it could just be a really tight window between him popping up and opening fire?
Edit: here's a video with the guy's corpse in his shooting position.
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But drones with cameras are cheap. Couldn't the Secret Service have easily had eyes on all the rooftops within sniper range?
There may be an issue with drones that, if you have several of your own drones flying around for security, it's much harder to spot an unauthorized drone that may be up to no good.
From some of the pics, it looks like some of the security detail was from local police, so maybe a core SS detail coordinates with local law enforcement for events like these, which means using teams that are not necessarily accustomed to the scope of sweep needed for events like this?
Suicide drones are a bigger threat than shooters, so public security officials prefer to lock down the airspace entirely, and current practices prefer clean air to ease identification of assets, using tethered drones for station keeping in fixed positions (so visual rotations, not patrols, and both are insufficient to cover a 1km radius without 9 or more teams). No Unmanned Traffic Management system exists yet, and these opt-in systems cannot handle uncooperative elements.
Interesting, thanks. Then shouldn't the Secret Service have placed fixed cameras on all the roofs in shooting range that they didn't plan to have men on?
Installing temporary cameras is actually super irritating and most agents on the ground prefer to walk and use their eyes instead of fiddling with cameras. An agent in an elevated position can just turn his head to scan a sector, then walk 8 meters and see another sector. Temporary cameras streaming to a command post have relatively low resolution for transmission ease, and can't move. You need to spam a shitload of cameras, and therefore spam a shitload of observers. A command post can only stuff so many bodies in it and comms overload is something to be guarded against.
Update: I saw the map of the shooting. I take back my above regarding observer spam. The entire site is practically empty with the firing position being literally the closest point to target with direct line of sight, and no clutter or surplus of alternative angles of attack. There is no excuse for this magnitude of failure. This isn't a rally at a factory or a town center with a shitload of positions to consider, its a fucking open field. An absolute failure by SS to secure this barest of bare minimums.
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