The Trump shooting has exposed the scourge of safetyism
Secret Service agents were more concerned with protecting themselves than the former president.
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It was bad enough that the US Secret Service agents surrounding Donald Trump during last Saturday’s assassination attempt appeared distracted as they fumbled with the holsters holding their guns. But it has now emerged that they took a conscious decision not to put operatives on the roof from where shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks was later to launch his attack. Why? Because doing so would pose a health-and-safety risk. Apparently, the sloped roof used by Trump’s would-be assassin was deemed ‘too dangerous’ for agents to use. Such institutionalised cowardice ought to disturb every public figure facing the threat of political violence.
This risk-averse culture is not limited to the Secret Service. It is prevalent within law-enforcement agencies, too. This was illustrated by the police response two years ago to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Almost 400 officers responded to the incident, in which a lone gunman shot and killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. Yet they refrained from immediately confronting the shooter while he was in a classroom filled with students and several teachers. In fact, they waited for more than an hour for a Border Patrol tactical team to arrive before they went in and took the shooter down. Had they intervened earlier, they could have saved the lives of many of those who were later shot dead.
Risk-aversion within the police is causing similar problems in the UK, too. This was brought home by a tragic incident in Surrey in 2016. After a man had fallen into the River Thames, local police officers arrived at the scene to help him. But a police inspector then ordered his officers not to attempt a rescue. The inspector later explained his decision, saying that his officers lacked the necessary training: ‘I felt the risk was too great in those circumstances.’ The image of a group of police officers watching from the riverbank as a man drowned in front of them was truly shocking. Those with a duty to protect the public from harm signally failed to do so.
Such incidents across the Anglo-American world illustrate the extent to which risk-aversion has taken hold among our police, security forces and military. Notions of honour, self-sacrifice and public duty have given way to concerns about health and safety.
It has been a long time coming. In 2007, General Sir Michael Rose, former head of the UK’s Special Air Services (SAS), was already warning of the destructive impact of risk-aversion on the British Army. He said it was encouraging ‘moral cowardice’ and causing the ‘most catastrophic collapse’ of the military ethos in recent history.
If anything, the decline of the military, warrior ethos is even more comprehensive within the US military. Since its adoption of a policy of ‘force protection’ during the 1980s, the American military has prioritised the protection of military personnel and equipment ‘from threats or hazards in order to preserve operational effectiveness’. One analyst noted that this risk-aversion is undermining the very effectiveness of the army: ‘As emphasis on risk-avoidance filters down the chain of command, junior commanders and their soldiers become aware that low-risk behaviour is expected and act accordingly.’
In both the UK and the US, the culture of risk-aversion has slowly emptied the military, the police and the security forces of their moral content. As army general HR McMaster observed in 2021, ‘the warrior ethos is at risk’. He added that, ‘if lost, it might be regained only at an exorbitant price’.
We are certainly now seeing the cost. Last week, a candidate for president of the US was almost assassinated because some of the agents tasked with protecting him were under the spell of health and safety. Once the values of health and safety become institutionalised, they trump the risk-taking values of courage and sacrifice. Bodyguards become more concerned with protecting themselves than with the lives of those they should be duty-bound to protect.
Now more than ever, we need to remember that there are some things worth taking risks for.
Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.
Pictures by: Getty.
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