An emerging picture indicates that better communications tech between agencies may have prevented the Trump shooting—and that getting the Secret Service, law enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security on the same page communications-wise could be instrumental in preventing future assassination attempts.
A congressional report from late last month notes that the Secret Service didn’t have the right radios to talk to Butler County police—because they forgot to pick them up before the event—and that likely played a key role in the poorly coordinated response.
That failure speaks to a larger equipment problem: Secret Service, DHS, military, and police radios don’t all work together.
Local law enforcement spotted the attacker, Thomas Matthew Crooks, “scurrying” to position himself to take a shot from the roof of a nearby building. But the unified command on the ground relayed only part of what was going on to the Secret Service: namely that they were responding to an incident.
Mobile mesh networks that bridge the gaps between different communications systems, protocols, etc., could help link everything together in a single data web that could then be distributed to many different types of devices securely.
But training and exercising is another barrier to wider adoption, he said. The military has a lot of time to conduct exercises to see what is and isn’t working in the field, whereas many law enforcement agencies and the Secret Service do not have time to take away from their regular duties for similar exercises.
