Recently
there have been an increased number of attempts to penetrate the White House
security. You would never think that anyone would put their life at risk and
attempt to get inside the front door of the most heavily guarded residence in
the United States. In just the past few weeks there have been 2 men that have jumped
the fence and headed for the house. In situations like these, the secret
service has many critical choices to make in a very short amount of time. It is
from this that I have started to wonder about the type of standards they have
for making the correct decisions and using the right amount of force in these
types of scenarios.
In the
type of events we have recently seen, the threat level hasn’t exactly been
extreme as neither of the trespassers were in possession of a type of bag to
house an explosive device or a gun of any sort. Given the residence that it is,
what type of standards does the secret service have to make the correct call
when someone approaches the White House. In the most recent fence jumping attempt, the
man made it all the way into the White House before being subdued. The
statement in the news said that the man did not have a backpack on and did not
appear to have a weapon on him, and therefore warranted the lower degree of
force. He did still manage to get inside the house though. While the President
has full confidence in the SS, which he definitely should, I think this may
make some people look over their standards for their security, or for the
manner in which they deal with these situations. This one did not have any
consequences but we certainly don’t want to wait for something to happen before
things get changed like with their incident in 2012 in Columbia.
Back in
2012, the standards for the SS got a few new additions to counter act their
prostitution scandal in Columbia. Seems like a pretty classic case of having to
add new standards that you would think would be followed by common sense. In a
job like working for the Secret Service, professionalism is extremely
important. When representing the
government, you can bet they have a surplus of standards in the professionalism
category, and they just got a few more. It looks like the standards for dealing
with fence jumpers might be getting a few more now too. All in all, I think we
can all agree that if the situation warrants, the SS will not have any problem
using more aggressive force. This really brought to light how many standards we
all think about everyday as we keep in mind being accountable for all of our
actions. While you may not realize you are thinking about standards throughout
your day, they really are everywhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment