(NewsNation) — Local law enforcement in Butler, Pennsylvania, is firing back against comments made by acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe in a joint Senate committee regarding the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life.
Rowe criticized the local authorities for a communications breakdown between agencies protecting the former president. But Pat Young, the chief of detectives for Beaver County who was tasked with securing the area around Trump’s rally, said they had no communication with the federal authorities that day.
“Somehow, that we should have had a line of sight on not only the crowd but the area to the side of the building where the shooter was eventually located is kind of ridiculous,” Young told NewsNation. “The ability to redeploy to another area is also kind of this ridiculous notion that’s out there that somehow our guys, despite guidance from Secret Service, could somehow relocate to a better vantage point is almost laughable in some regards.”
Young insists that it was his team that spotted the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, roughly an hour before the actual shooting took place. He said they raised it up the chain of command, and said what happens beyond that is up to the Secret Service.
Rowe’s testimony was the most detailed catalog to date by the Secret Service of law enforcement failings and miscommunications. While he pointedly criticized the local law enforcement during the proceedings, he also accepted blame for his own agency’s mistakes.
“What I saw made me ashamed. As a career law enforcement officer and a 25-year Secret Service veteran, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured,” he said.
“We assumed that the state and locals had it,” Rowe added. “We made an assumption that there was going to be uniformed presence out there, that there would be sufficient eyes to cover that, that there was going to be counter-sniper teams” in the building from whose roof Crooks fired shots.
Rowe now says he has implemented multiple reforms since taking over as acting director last week, including mandating that every event security plan is vetted by multiple experienced supervisors before being implemented, expanding the use of aerial drones to improve visibility of roofs, dedicating more resources to improve communications at events where the Secret Service is operating. He said he’s also directed that federal and local counter snipers work together on roofs.