The Secret Service has a storied history of preventing assassination attempts on the president and the First Family.
However, the once-proud agency’s responses to recent White House breaches represent a massive institutional failure.
Since 2011, there have been two serious attacks on the White House. In November 2011, Oscar Ortega-Hernandez pulled up to the front gate of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., aimed and fired a semi-automatic rifle at the White House. Then he fled the scene after striking the building seven times. The Obama’s daughter Sasha and Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, were home, and Malia was on her way.
Even more troubling than the shooting attempt itself was the response of the Secret Service to the incident. After shots were fired, on-duty Secret Service agents were told by their commanding officer to stand down because the sounds were believed to be coming from a construction car backfiring. Commanding officers later concluded the shots came from gangsters shooting at each other near the property.
The Secret Service leadership never interviewed agents who were on duty during the shooting. It took a housekeeper finding a broken White House window for agents to investigate further. The Secret Service then took four more days to connect the evidence to the shooter.
On Sept. 19, Omar Gonzalez jumped the White House fence, ran across the lawn, opened the front door to the Entrance Hall and was finally apprehended in the East Room. He happened to pass by the flight of stairs leading up to the First Family’s living quarters.
Thankfully, none of them were home at the time. It is alarming Gonzalez was able to enter the White House through the front door, overpower an agent and sprint through the 80-foot-long East Room, all while carrying a knife.
The failures of the Secret Service were magnified by bipartisan congressional outrage when members of Congress grilled the agency’s director, Julia Pierson, at a hearing.
After the hearings, even more troubling information about the Gonzalez incident surfaced. The agent who tackled and apprehended Gonzalez turned out to be an off-duty agent who happened to be strolling by the entrance. There was no agent assigned to guard the front door, and the surrounding guards were not alerted because the alarm box was muted.
To say that the Secret Service dropped the ball would be an understatement. All these astounding mistakes demonstrate the need for additional scrutiny of the agency’s protocols and operations.
On Wednesday, Pierson did the right thing and offered her resignation. However, the commanding officers of the Secret Service should lose their jobs as well.
The White House is usually considered to be one of the most secure buildings in the country. There is no reason why someone should be able to fire gunshots at the presidential residence.
There is no excuse for an unauthorized person to be able to infiltrate the White House through the front door. Regardless of your political leaning, the president deserves protection, and the Secret Service is obligated to provide that security.
An assassination attempt on the president would not only be a devastating national trauma but also send a dangerous message that America is no longer even able to protect its political leaders.
Clearly, the Secret Service is in dire need of new and effective leadership. The agency’s new leader must be tasked with maintaining a top-notch security team that would impress the Avengers or the Justice League. As the leader of the free world, the president requires nothing less.
Harold Joseph is a UF political science junior. His columns appear on Fridays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 10/3/2014]
