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Notes -
A sudden surge in personnel could cause exactly the kind of organisational chaos that allows for gaps in oversight, especially when multiple organisations are involved.
To me, at least from the outside perspective, the organizational chaos is the big unreported story. It appears that the cops were given some autonomy in how they guarded that building without having to tell the USSS what they were actually doing there. Which not only opens up the roof as a vantage point, but creates chaos exactly where it could have been lethal — until they confirmed that the guy on the roof wasn’t a cop in a t-shirt acting on orders, they can’t just assume the guy on the roof isn’t a cop. So they’re trying to get in contact with every unit near the building to find out. That takes too much time.
What should have happens that they should’ve put any locals directly under the command of one USSS agent, no one deviates from the plan without clearing it first or at least telling the central command. Then you plan for everything within gunshot range, putting someone at every access point and on the roofs. But also removing the delays necessary when you don’t know who’s doing what and thus have to waste precious time trying to contact every independent agency involved to make sure it’s not one of their guys.
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I think mismanaging a sudden surge in personnel could cause that kind of organizational chaos, but the cause would be the mismanagement, not the surge in personnel. Everyone knows that a sudden surge in personnel, especially when multiple organizations are involved, is likely to be messy and cause unforeseen complications. Thus anyone in charge of such a situation has the responsibility to account for that chaos by preventing it, mitigating it, circumventing it, etc. So all this explanation would do is to raise the question of how/why the director of the Secret Service behaved so incompetently as to allow this kind of organizational chaos to occur. Perfection is impossible, but the level of failure that occurred here isn't in the realm of "they just can't reach the impossible standard of perfection" and closer to "it'd be difficult to make the failure look more intentional if you'd tried."
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