Where Was the Flying Squad?

A Congressional hearing has begun on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Some Congressional hearings generate a lot of heat and very little light. They become a platform for members of Congress to show their constituents what a great job they're doing, raising campaign money, and national exposure to expand their brand outside their fortress districts.

The history of the phrase "Flying Squad":

The squad was originally formed on an experimental basis by Detective Chief Inspector Frederick Wensley. In October 1919, Wensley summoned 12 detectives to Scotland Yard to form the squad. The group was initially named the Mobile Patrol Experiment and its original orders were to perform surveillance and gather intelligence on known robbers and pickpockets, using a horse-drawn carriage with covert holes cut into the canvas. In 1920, it was officially reorganized under the authority of then Commissioner Nevil Macready. Headed by Detective Inspector Walter Hambrook, the squad was composed of 12 detective officers, including Irish-born Jeremiah Lynch (1888–1953), who had earned a fearsome reputation for tracking wartime German spies and for building up the case against confidence trickster Horatio Bottomley. The Mobile Patrol Experiment was given authorization to carry out duties anywhere in the Metropolitan Police District, meaning that its officers did not have to observe Divisions, giving rise to the name of the Flying Squad because the unit operated across London without adhering to divisional policing boundaries. - from Wikipedia

As I've mentioned in other posts, I was assigned to the Secret Service Counter-Sniper Team on an overnight presidential visit. My partner was a Secret Service agent, and we patrolled the area of the hotel hosting the president in a marked police car. We had 4 or 5 cars on that assignment. Our job was to investigate any suspicious activity reported by the sniper team or anything that we saw on the streets around the hotel area.

The agent's radio had access to the sniper team and other agents in the hotel. My radio had access to police transmissions from the hotel and district officers in the downtown area and 9-1-1 dispatchers. My expertise was not as a sniper. My expertise entailed knowing the streets and how to find any location that we were directed to by the Secret Service or reports of suspicious activity by police officers in the area of the hotel. We did not call ourselves the "Flying Squad."

From Fox News:

Paul Mauro, an attorney and retired NYPD inspector who has been involved in several multi-agency security coordination efforts during his career, said a "flying squad" should have nabbed Crooks well before he pulled the trigger. A "flying squad," which can have different names, is an untethered, mobile response team that acts as roving surveillance and chases down anything suspicious. Crooks was first identified as a "suspicious person of interest" around 5:10 p.m., the FBI told Congress, according to a lawmaker who was at Wednesday's FBI briefing and spoke to Fox News Digital on the condition of anonymity. At 5:30 p.m., a witness spotted Crooks with a rangefinder. Other rally attendees reported Crooks' suspicious movements to police. But stationed law enforcement officers can't leave their posts, in case the suspicious person or item is meant as a diversion, Mauro explained. That's why there's a separate team.

It appears that local officers assigned to traffic duty had to respond to the location of the sniper.

Watching the hearings right now, it has already devolved into a gun rights issue from the usual suspects. An after-action report should concern the specific actions, or the lack of actions, on that day by the Secret Service and local law enforcement officers. It should assess the communication, fixed posts, roving patrols, and whether there was a briefing with the Secret Service and local law enforcement days before the event. The briefing must include the Rules of Engagement for police officers in a combined Secret Service protection event.