Any given weekday, there are about 20,000 people in the United States Capitol complex—which has nearly 20 buildings sprawled over nearly 300 acres. Across those many buildings, there are dozens of tunnels, nooks, crannies, and thousands of different rooms. It’s a daunting place and difficult to learn your way around.
Protecting each entry point to the Capitol, guarding the roads surrounding the complex, stationed in hallways, outside the chambers, and elsewhere are the brave men and women of the United States Capitol Police.
As House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, an aide, a lobbyist, and two members of his protective detail lay wounded in the hospital this morning, I thought back to my time as a congressional aide working for then-Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl. All members of leadership in Congress are provided with a detail of highly-trained officers pretty much 24/7, whether in Washington, or in Louisiana, or Arizona, or wherever.
The dignitary protection details, as they’re called, are the real deal. Their long and unusual hours require that they are exempt from the USCP’s collective bargaining agreement. A typical day might involve work at the Capitol, a cross country flight, followed by an hours-long drive to a destination, before any relief or respite. Always on alert.
When you work side by side with these dedicated men and women, they become your colleagues. They become your friends. Christmas parties, baby showers, happy hours, intramural softball games and the like. In a sense, they’re employees of the office itself, just like you. Except that while your job might be to write memos and take meetings, their job involves body armor, bullets, and guns.
A lot of aides (myself included) don’t reflect on that as much as they should: That Capitol Police officer has pledged to do everything, including die, to protect you. Yes, that same guy who plays first base on your softball team. (Four USCP officers have died in the line of duty over the years.) Everyone knows that police are in a dangerous line of work, but sometimes you don’t appreciate the risks that the person who sits (or more often stands) nearby is taking.
Many members of this elite detail are former military, while others worked their way through the ranks to get on leadership detail. They train extensively at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) and elsewhere. On a slow day, sometimes you can convince one of them to regale you with detailed descriptions of evasive driving techniques (when a car is blocking the road, aim for the axle!), but they’re more or less tight-lipped about such things. They’re there to do their jobs.
In the back of their minds, most staffers know that the Capitol is always a target. Sometimes when there’s a false alarm, or a disturbed individual acts, we’re reminded of that.
It’s not yet known if James T. Hodgkinson, Wednesday’s alleged shooter, was known to the Capitol Police as a threat. But there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people the USCP has to keep tabs on because they’ve made explicit or implicit threats because they take politics so seriously. Other times, they’re unknown to police and only become known after the dust has settled.
In instances where threats are made, Capitol Police work with local police to figure out how serious they are. Aides are sometimes given (or shown) information sheets on threats, produced by the USCP’s intelligence division, usually with a photo. You look at the photo, sometimes a mug shot, other times a driver’s license-type photo and think: “This is the guy who threatened our boss.” Sometimes the photo is of a clearly disturbed individual, other times it’s a photo of a person who, based on appearances, you’d never suspect of making a death threat.
When a threat has been made, that’s when you start thinking about your friends on your boss’s protective detail, and how lucky you are to have them there to help keep you safe. But as the threat fades, so, too do the thoughts about the potential for harm.
On Wednesday morning, threats were probably the last thing on the minds of Rep. Scalise and the other members and aides playing baseball at a field in Alexandria in preparation for Thursday’s annual congressional baseball game. But not for Scalise’s protective detail.
Away from the well-armed Capitol, USCP special agents typically carry Glock 27s, or something like them: easy to carry and conceal .40 caliber weapons with a couple of extra magazines. On Wednesday they were pitted against a man allegedly armed with an semi-automatic carbine rifle. They were surprised and outgunned from the start.
Thanks to their training and a quick response by the Alexandria sheriff, two USCP special agents were able to neutralize the threat without (at the time of this writing, and hopefully without need for an update) any loss of life.
Rep. Scalise and his aides seem to be doing okay, per press accounts. The two members of Scalise’s detail, special agents David Bailey and Krystal Griner, are in the hospital with serious wounds. One of them is reportedly undergoing surgery.
How lucky we are as a country to have such brave patriots.
