Spoke with some LEO friends, and was reminded of something:
You may recall that the Bush family lived in Houston, and spent quite a bit of time out & about, which was a fair bit of work for the USSS detail. they told me two things of note:
1. Local/County/State LEO are on a different band from the USSS coms. That is, the Secret Service has an agent monitoring nominal police radio, but the primary detail has their own coms. That means since witnesses has noted that they reported seeing a man on the roof to
police but not USSS agents (Service detail people have specific assignments and do not speak with the public), the detail would only be made aware of a man on the roof if police made comment on their band about it, and LEO may have initially believed the Service had already cleared the skyline and anyone on the roof was just an undercover agent;
2. This was the first active shooter targeting a President-level primary in decades, and the detail's reaction showed emotion and delayed response. At best, the detail had not practiced this kind of scenario and at worst, there were agents in the detail who simply should not have had that role. The officers I spoke with explained that they did not want to judge, but for a long time the USSS preferred agents with combat military experience or actual gunfire experience. That policy has changed, but the officers did not feel comfortable nailing down when that changed. One man reminded me of the Service agent who was cut off from President Bush while accompanying him in Russia back in November of 2004; things like that happen but are not usually made public the way yesterday's missteps were obvious.
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier